


Prince's Downfall

by Rollercoasterwords



Series: Laurent's Perspective [3]
Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Canon Compliant, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Slow Burn, enemies to friends to lovers to enemies to reluctant friends to lovers again
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:20:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 64,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28746837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rollercoasterwords/pseuds/Rollercoasterwords
Summary: King's Rising from Laurent's perspective! Chapter by chapter, same as the first two books.
Relationships: Damen & Laurent (Captive Prince), Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Series: Laurent's Perspective [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2048732
Comments: 125
Kudos: 286





	1. Chapter One

_Once upon a time, there was a princess so beautiful she could kill men just by breathing. She lived in a tall castle through an enchanted forest with her mother, the queen. She was utterly perfect in every way, graceful and kind and charming, and as she grew older she only became more enchanting._

There was blood in his mouth, he could taste it. How had it gotten there? Was it his?

_When she came of age, princes and kings from around the world flocked to her kingdom to beg for her hand in marriage. Every man who saw her felt he might die if he had to live without her. Because of this, the queen kept the princess hidden away behind a veil. But that only drew more men, desperate to uncover the mysterious and deadly beauty that the princess possessed._

No, it was not his. It belonged to the man in front of him, whose throat had been punched through with steel. Laurent watched his eyes go dark, like tiny suns dying. He withdrew his blade.

_The queen loved her daughter, and did not want to marry her off to a king or a prince who would sweep the girl far away to foreign lands. So she devised a test, a set of three impossible tasks. Whichever suitor could complete this test first would be allowed her daughter’s hand in marriage._

The man staggered and fell, body now an empty shell. He was young—nineteen, perhaps, or twenty. Aimeric’s age. Laurent’s age.

_Many men tried, but all failed. They were sent away from the castle, cursing the queen for her impossible test. The princess remained with her mother, hidden away behind her veil in her tall castle, growing more beautiful every day._

Another man took his place, and another. The sun had set; the light of the moon was weak. The man fighting next to him fell.

_One day, a new suitor arrived. He was the prince of a faraway kingdom, and had sailed across great crashing seas to reach the castle. He made his way through the enchanted forest to reach the castle, and as he approached the threshold where towering trees gave way to the open space beyond, he noticed a rabbit caught in a trap._

Laurent could feel sweat, hot and thick, beading on his brow. The crush of grass under hooves and feet had a sweet, incongruent smell which, mixed with the iron tang of blood, made his stomach churn.

_The rabbit begged the prince for help. He was a kind-hearted man, and stopped to free the creature. What he did not know was that it was a magic rabbit, and, once freed, it owed the prince a life debt. The rabbit told the prince that should he ever need help, he had only to return to the threshold of the enchanted wood and call once for the rabbit to appear._

There were too many—he could feel it more than see it, in the crush of bodies, in the awful heat of dying breaths, in the sharp ringing sound of steel. He raised his sword, again and again, as the muscles across his back and shoulders screamed.

_The prince continued on his way to the castle. Once there, he was received by the queen. She told the prince that if he sought to marry her daughter, he would have to complete her test. The prince agreed immediately, confident in his abilities. The queen smiled, and told him the first task: he must race the sun, and win._

Who were they? Mercenaries? No—they wore Veretian armor. Forces from Fortaine, then. An ambush. Laurent wondered how many Veretian men he would have to cut down to drag himself onto the throne.

_The prince despaired, for the task was impossible. But he remembered the rabbit. Having nothing to lose, he left the castle and approached the threshold of the enchanted forest, where he called once. Immediately, the rabbit leapt out of the brush._

Was it worth it? How many lives, in exchange for a throne?

_The rabbit listened as the prince explained his quest. The rabbit watched as he wept for the futility of his plight. The prince lamented that he should never be happy without the princess, for he wanted nothing more than to see her face, and gaze upon it all the rest of his days. The rabbit could see that what the prince said was true._

No—there was no use in such manner of thought. Laurent’s sword buried itself in the gut of an approaching soldier. In the dark, they were all Veretian; he could not tell friend from foe until the very final second.

_“Take my feet,” said the rabbit, “And carry them with you. When you need them, slip them into the heels of your shoes. You will become faster than the sun.” Amazed, the prince did as the rabbit instructed. The next morning, the castle gathered to watch the sun rise and make its steady journey towards horizon. The prince prepared himself, slipping the rabbit’s feet into the heels of his shoes. Instantly, he was overcome with speed. The castle watched, awestruck, as he ran—faster than the sun—to the horizon, where sky meets earth._

It was no use—Laurent could feel the inevitability of their defeat as his men fell, one by one. Still, he fought, until his blade was red and dripping.

_The next morning, the queen gave the prince his second task: he must listen to the song of the moon, and write down what secrets she whispered. Again, the prince despaired, for this second task was even more impossible than the first. He returned to the forest, and called once more for the rabbit._

He could not give up; he could not stop fighting. He could not let the Regent succeed. Laurent had a promise to keep.

_This time, the rabbit could not leap. It crawled out from the brush, and the prince explained his newest plight. The rabbit listened, and at the end of it said, “Here. Take my ears. Wear them around your neck at night, and you will hear the song of the moon. They can understand any language. With this, you will be able to complete the second task.”_

There were two men, now, in front of him; he danced and parried, dodging their blows. His horse had been cut down long ago.

_The prince did as the rabbit instructed. That very night, he wore the ears around his neck, and he listened as the moon rose in the sky. He was shocked to hear an exquisite voice, gentle and sad, singing the most beautiful song he had heard in his life. The prince remained awake all night, listening and writing down the secrets of the moon._

Laurent could feel his body tiring, his mind going numb with sheer exhaustion. There were fewer and fewer of his own men left, and more and more enemies. From every side, there was steel crashing down.

_The next morning, the prince presented the queen with the song of the moon. The royal musicians were called to perform, and anyone hearing it could not deny that the song was the most beautiful they had ever encountered, full of secrets about love and life. Reluctantly, the queen told the prince his third task: he must capture a shooting star._

There were too many—he could not do—but he had to, he had to—two days, in two—he had to be at Charcy—

_This time, the prince felt the task was truly impossible. Still, he made his way to the forest and called again for the rabbit. This time, the prince had to wait for the rabbit to receive his message—for, without ears, it was difficult to hear the call. Still, the rabbit came. The prince explained his task, and the rabbit listened as best it could._

Damen would be waiting for him at Charcy. He needed only to keep fighting, and to get there—

_“Take my heart,” said the rabbit. “Shooting stars are afraid of death. They want meat, and blood, and magic. If you stand under the night sky and hold my heart in the palm of your hand, it will protect you, and you can catch a shooting star.”_

But even if he made it to Charcy now, he would have no army. Laurent could see his carefully constructed plan crumbling, slipping through his fingers like ash and dust. And still, he fought.

_“You are hardly alive as you are now,” said the prince. “If I take your heart, you will die.”_

He fought until blood stained his sword, and his armor, and his hands.

_“I have been dead,” said the rabbit, “since the day that you saved me from that trap. The life I live now is borrowed, and it is mine to give as I see fit. You gifted me with life that day. Now I will give it back.”_

He fought until the sword was ripped from his hand, and even then, he struggled against the arms that restrained him.

_So the prince did as he was told, and took the rabbit’s heart._

He fought even as he did not understand, even as he waited for the sharp bite of steel and found only hands, stripping his armor, wrapping heavy rope around his wrists.

_He carried it back to the castle, and he stood under the night sky with the heart in his hands. A shooting star, falling to the earth, smelled the blood and the magic and the meat. It rushed towards the prince in a frenzied dance of burning light._

He fought even as he was tied, even as he was dragged over the bodies of his men.

_The star collided with the rabbit’s heart in an explosion so dazzling that the prince was forced to close his eyes, or go blind. When he opened them, he found that star and heart had become one, and turned into the most beautiful jewel he had ever seen. It seemed to sparkle and dance with light, even in the complete darkness of night._

He fought even as the fists collided with his stomach, forcing him to gag and retch.

_The next morning, the prince showed the queen his fallen star, and she could not deny that he had completed her test. The jewel was made into a ring, and prince and princess were married that very same day. When he lifted her veil, the prince wept at her beauty. In the enchanted forest, the rabbit became skin and then bone and then nothing, returning to the dark earth._

He fought until the blow to his head turned the whole world into a swirling haze that narrowed in his eyes to pinpricks of light, and then went black.

_And the prince and the princess lived happily ever after._


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there! Since this chapter is actually from Laurent's perspective in the book, I'm not going to be rewriting it or copying and pasting in the text. Instead, I'm just going to include a little summary of what happens! I'll try and get the third chapter up soon, since that's when stuff really starts to pick up :)

Go read the original chapter from the book!!

But if you don't want to do that for whatever reason, here's a summary of what happens in ch 2:

-Laurent wakes up tied to a chair in a cell at Fortaine with Govart; his right shoulder is dislocated

-Laurent realizes that he was ambushed and captured, meaning he missed his rendezvous at Charcy and Damen probably thinks Laurent betrayed him

-He also realizes he's about to be tortured to death by Govart, who requested this

-The Regent agreed to Govart's request because of whatever piece of leverage Govart has over him

***

-After the first hour of torture, there's a knife in Laurent's dislocated shoulder and he's freed his left hand

-Guion shows up with a key and tells Govart to hurry up (opening the cell door in the process)

-Laurent gets them to start arguing by pointing out that Govart has his own private arrangement with the Regent

-While they're fighting Laurent pulls the knife out of his right shoulder with his left hand, cuts his bonds, and stands up

-Laurent feints with the knife and then uses his right arm to slam the chair into Govart's head, killing him

-Guion gets out of the way of the fight and Laurent darts through the cell door, closes it, and locks it

-Laurent deduces that nobody except Guion and Govart know of his presence at Fortaine, because Guion didn't want anyone to know that he was supporting the Regent in killing the heir

-This means no one will find Guion once Laurent leaves

-It also means that if Laurent walks out into Fortaine, no one will know to capture him or kill him because, again, this was all a secret arrangement involving the Regent, Govart, and Guion

-Once Laurent leaves, he can tell the world that Guion helped him escape; the Regent will probably kill Guion's family in retaliation

-Having laid the situation out thusly, Guion agrees to switch sides and work with Laurent in order to protect his family

And that's where chapter two ends! 


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for suicide 
> 
> Laurent breaks the news about Aimeric’s death to Guion, and it isn’t pretty, so please be prepared for that.

“First,” said Laurent, “I am going to make a scene. I am going to leave you here and walk until I find people, a great deal of them, so that everyone at Fortaine will know within the hour that they are hosting the Prince of Vere.”

Guion watched him steadily through the bars of the cell, cold hatred in his eyes. 

“Then, I am going to tell everyone what you did.” 

“And that is?” 

Laurent smiled, lips curving up cruelly.

“Why, you saved me, of course.”

Guion’s features hardened, but he remained silent, listening. 

“I will explain how I woke, alone, in this cell with Govart, who under orders from my uncle planned to commit treason by ending my life. Govart summoned you, thinking foolishly that you would assist with the plan. But of course, you are loyal to the crown, and you helped me escape—in fact, you gave me the key and locked yourself in the cell with Govart, to keep him from hurting me. It was very heroic.” 

“And then?”

“Then your men will free you, and you will pledge yourself and all you own to me. Fortaine will be under my control, and you will tell me all you know of the Regent’s plans for Charcy.” 

There was a moment of silence, in which the light of the torches flickered against the stone walls. Laurent could feel the hot slide of blood from the open wound in his shoulder. He forced himself to breathe steadily, feeling in every part of his body the pain of Govart’s ministrations. 

“Charcy,” said Guion, with a small, private twist of his lips. Laurent’s stomach became a stone. Guion was holding something back, some crucial piece of information—it did not matter. He would know it all soon enough. 

“You understand your position,” said Laurent. 

Guion inclined his head. “Yes, your Highness.”

***

It happened exactly as he had described. Laurent stumbled from prison cells to hallways to an open courtyard, where he sagged against the stone walls, doing his best to act for all the world like the battered, exhausted victim of some horrible crime. It was not a terribly difficult facade, considering that he had, in fact, lost quite a bit of blood, and that the world continued to flicker ominously even absent the torchlight. 

The first person to notice him was a woman, who screamed. After that it was a rush of confusion and shock and horror as the people of Fortaine discovered that the crown prince had somehow, inexplicably, appeared and—even more inexplicably—seemed to be on death’s doorstep. 

Laurent could see, as he was hurried to a physician to be poked and prodded and patched, that his guess had been correct: Guion, in his need for secrecy, had neglected to order his men to capture the Prince, should he appear. The true nature of the ambush launched from Fortaine had likely been obscured from the soldiers who fought; those few who had been directly involved in capturing and transporting the Prince had either been eliminated or paid to keep silent, and posed no threat to Laurent now. As a physician bandaged his wounded shoulder, he relayed the story of his escape from the prison cells, assisted by Guion, and men were dispatched promptly to free the Councillor. By the time Guion had been dragged out of the cell, Laurent had been washed, dressed, and thoroughly bandaged. 

He received Guion in the king’s suite, a sprawling set of rooms whose opulence was almost sickening. Plush, ornate rugs lined the stone floors; the windows were colored panes of glass overlaid with delicate iron grilles. The bed was monstrous, and draped in heavy silks. Laurent sat behind a carved wooden desk that held porcelain bowls of fruit and a pitcher of water. He had turned away the wine. 

Guion bowed stiffly when he entered. Laurent dismissed the guards at the door with a wave of his hand, and they were alone. 

“My family?” Guion’s voice was guarded, carefully neutral.

“You have no need to worry,” said Laurent. “They are safe, and well-guarded. With Govart’s treason, I have taken every precaution.”

Guion nodded once. “I see. We are to be prisoners in our own home?” 

“If you like.” Laurent smiled. “Of course, if you are loyal, there is no need for imprisonment. Think of it as...protection.”

“Of course.” 

“I have men occupied currently with hunting down any other traitors involved in Govart’s plan. If you have any information to share, now would be prudent. For the safety of your family, of course.” 

“Of course.” This time the words were forced out through gritted teeth.

Laurent waited, patiently, weathering Guion’s murderous glare. Eventually: “You will find no other traitors at Fortaine. All those involved in—Govart’s plot...have been dealt with.”

Laurent nodded. It was no more than what he had already guessed.

“Well then,” he leaned back in the chair, resting his chin casually against one wrist, “Charcy. Tell me everything you know.” 

Guion hesitated, then said, “The Regent sent seven thousand men. They intended to flank your forces, and trap them between two contingents. Whatever men you have sent to Charcy are already lost.” 

There was a stab of fear, which Laurent repressed. Six thousand men. Even with the Akielon reinforcements, his faction would be dangerously outnumbered. No—they had already been outnumbered, caught in a suicidal battle. It was now mid-morning—the fighting had likely begun a few hours hence. Even if Laurent rode out now with the entire army of Fortaine, they would never arrive in time. 

Yet he could not bring himself to believe that Charcy was lost. He thought of Damen, who moved like water when he fought, his sword an extension of his own body. He thought of that otherworldly power, those eyes that burned like suns. Damen would not be cut down at Charcy. He would not lead his men to their deaths. 

“Perhaps,” Laurent said, voice mild, “or perhaps not. I suppose we will see. But I already knew that.”

Guion shifted slightly, like a man repressing the instinct to back away from a wolf. 

“Guion,” said Laurent.

“Your Highness,” said Guion.

There was a pause as they stared at each other. Laurent studied the sweat beading along the Councillor’s hairline, the stiff tension with which he held himself, the bob of his throat as he swallowed, nervously. 

Laurent leaned forward, placing both elbows on the desk and leaning his chin against the back of his hands, fingers interlaced. 

“Let me put this clearly. Right now, you have two options. The first is to cooperate fully with me. Do that, and you and your family will remain unharmed. When I defeat my uncle and take my throne, I will pardon you for supporting him, provided you obey my every command.”

Guion said nothing as Laurent spoke, only stared. He looked nauseated by the conversation, which Laurent thought was a bit dramatic for a man who had been willing to turn a blind eye as his Prince was tortured to death. 

“Your second option is to defy me, out of some misguided hope that you will one day be able to win your way back into my uncle’s good graces. Let me explain what will happen if you do that: I will hurt your family, one by one, until you cooperate, and if you do not cooperate I will kill them. If by some miracle you are able to escape, or to contact the Regent, he will believe that you assisted me in escaping Govart. I have already made sure of that. Place yourself in his hands, and he will kill you and your family. Unfortunately, the sons you have left are now too old to buy back my uncle’s favor.” 

The hatred, which had remained steady in Guion’s eyes, now flickered.

“The sons I have left?” 

Laurent smiled coldly. “Did I forget to mention? Pretty Aimeric is dead.”

Guion’s face went white; he took a step back, as if in an attempt to physically distance himself from the words. 

Like a wolf with his jaw locked hard around a throat, Laurent sunk his teeth in. “Yes, it was horribly inconvenient. Sliced open his veins with a broken shard of glass and bled out like a stuck pig. A coward’s death. Seems it runs in the family.” 

“Stop,” Guion said.

“He was under the impression that my uncle actually cared for him. Can you imagine that? He didn’t think he’d be thrown away like garbage once he was too old to take to bed. I wonder if he thought his father would protect him?”

“Enough,” the word was raw, torn from Guion’s throat.

“Don’t you want to know his last words? He left a note.”

“ _No._ ” Guion was trembling. He took a deep, ragged breath. Laurent waited. 

“I understand,” said Guion. “You have my allegiance. I will tell you all I know.” 

“You make me sick,” said Laurent. He realized, suddenly, that he had at some point risen to his feet, and was leaning forward over the desk. He sat down, and waited for his breathing to steady itself. Anger tore at him, snapping its jaws. He wanted to rip Guion into tiny, shattered pieces. He wanted to say _how could you do that to your child_. 

Instead he said, “Go on, then. It would be an incredible inconvenience to kill any more of your sons. You have no idea the mess of blood that Aimeric left behind.” 

***

Laurent sat, alone, staring down at the parchment before him. 

Guion had told him everything. Charcy was a feint. The Regent had sailed three days ago for Ios, where he intended to slowly establish his power until the opportune moment came to overthrow Kastor entirely, and take hold of Akielos for himself. 

In the process of this quiet coup, the Regent would gain all the resources Akielos had to offer—-Laurent would not be able to stand against his uncle if he took hold of such power. He could not allow it to happen. But he could not stop it alone. 

If he survived the battle at Charcy— _he will, I know he will—_ then Damen would emerge as the true King of Akielos. The northern kyroi would support him in his war against Kastor—only now, Kastor would not be the only enemy he faced. 

It was a cruel joke, on the part of the Regent. Yet, practically, it made the most sense: Laurent would need to ally himself with King Damianos if he hoped to take down their common enemy. He wondered, briefly, if his uncle had somehow predicted that Damen’s identity would be revealed at the end of this southward campaign—if he had engineered it. 

It did not matter. What was important was the present situation, and what Laurent might do about it. An alliance with Damianos would be tenuous at best; neither the Akielon forces nor Laurent’s own Veretian men would easily accept such an arrangement. And at the end of it, if they were able to defeat the Regent, Laurent would be facing a new enemy: King Damianos, with his power firmly consolidated. Thus, if Laurent sought to dethrone his uncle, he must in the same campaign act as a stepping stone to power for his brother’s killer. 

Alliance was his only choice. But he could not afford it without some form of insurance.

Laurent scrawled two lines on the parchment, and called for a herald. He sent the man to Charcy with the sealed message. Then, he called once more for Guion as the plan unfolded itself in his mind. 

***

The camp had already been constructed when the herald returned. Rows upon rows of peaked, colored tents were pitched on the field outside Fortaine’s walls, the sun lighting the pavilions, the banners, and the silks of a graceful encampment. 

Laurent waited in his pavilion tent, its high ceiling canopied like a flowerhead, supported by six thick interior poles wrapped in spiralled silk. It was enclosing despite its size, the thick canvas enough to mute the sounds from outside. There were a few furnishings, low seats, cushions, and in the background a trestle table hung with its own coverings, and set with shallow bowls of sugared pears and oranges. 

The herald arrived, dust-covered and panting. He bore no parchment, his message spoken aloud: “King Damianos of Akielos marches with his army to Fortaine.” 

The immediate sensation was one of relief, a cool, soothing wave. Damen was alive. The relief was accompanied by a sharp burst of joy at this fact. 

Laurent allowed himself one moment to feel it. Then, immediately, the emotion was banished. For it was not truly Damen who rode now to meet him. It was Damianos, the King of Akielos. 

It was not going to be as it was at Ravenel. It was not going to be as it was at Acquitart, or at Nesson. There would be no private conversations over firelight, no exhilarating nighttime chases, no sweet, tender mornings. Like a rabbit caught in a trap, Laurent was surrounded on all sides by enemies, with little in the way of resources or allies. He could afford no weakness. 

More than that—he could afford nothing less than perfection, nothing less than cold, collected strength if he intended to make it alive to his twenty-first birthday. The upcoming reunion would not be joyful; the Akielon army marched to Ravenel under the impression that Laurent had left them to die at the Regent’s hand. They would see a coward, a coiled snake. 

Laurent would let them. Better they think him dangerous and cruel than vulnerable. 

So he sent the herald away, with instructions to prepare a retinue for the Akielon King’s reception. And he waited, locking away all lingering softness as he sharpened himself for their meeting. 

***

Laurent heard the commotion, even from inside the tent, of Damen’s arrival. He leaned his shoulder against one of the solid tent poles, heart pounding, a carefully constructed expression of cool nonchalance across his features.

There was the sound of horses, the calls of heralds, the harsh clatter of armor and steel. There was a low, rough command, spoken to the guard posted outside the tent. And then there was the sweep of canvas, and there was Damen. 

He was wearing Akielon armor: the breastplate, the short leather skirt, the high sandals, the short red cape pinned to his shoulder with a golden lion. His legs were bare from knee to mid-thigh; his arms, too, were bare. His wrists were covered by gauntlets, underneath which lay the single gold cuff. Laurent’s heart twisted in his chest. 

Silhouetted in the opening of the tent, he looked exactly like the creature of Laurent’s childhood nightmares. His armor was painted in the blood and gore of battle, his hair plastered to his neck with sweat. He stared down with those dark, burning eyes, fresh from war. The only difference was the cuff, tucked now behind armor. Laurent felt, more than ever before, that he was looking at his brother’s killer. He held onto that fact, like a shield. 

The tent flap fell behind him, closing them in. He had come alone, without an escort. It was not the usual protocol for such a meeting. Nothing between them was usual. 

Damen’s eyes swept the tent, and landed on Laurent. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

Laurent said, “Hello, lover.”

Some unfamiliar pain clawed its way across Damen’s face before he brought his features back under control. He stepped further into the tent, crushing delicate embroidered silks under his muddied feet. 

He threw the Regent’s banner down onto the table. It clattered, in a mess of mud and stained silk. Then turned his eyes to Laurent. There was a new kind of hardness behind his eyes, some wall that had not previously existed. Though he stood straight and tall, he felt distinctly weighed-down, like a man who has shouldered a great burden. Laurent realized that he was seeing Damen, for the first time, as King, with the weight of a kingdom across his scarred back. 

“Charcy is won.”

“I thought it would be.” 

Damen pressed his eyes closed for a moment, drawing in a deep breath. “Your men think you’re a coward. Nikandros thinks that you deceived us. That you sent us to Charcy, and left us there to die by your uncle’s sword.”

It was better this way, easier this way, the lines clearly drawn in the sand. Yet Laurent could not stop himself asking, “And is that what you think?” He kept his voice, with some effort, carefully neutral. 

“No,” Damen said. “Nikandros doesn’t know you.” 

It was worse than any blow Govart had dealt—that Damen could stand in front of him, covered in the muck and filth of slaughter, and still believe the best. 

“And you do.” 

The words were a challenge, a question—some mixture of both. He stood very still as Damen studied him, eyes scanning up and down his body, the careful arrangement of his weight. 

Deliberately, Damen stepped forward, and clasped Laurent’s right shoulder. 

Laurent forced himself not to react, though pain was a hot spike through his body. _You don’t know me—you don’t know me like you think you do._ But Damen only frowned, tightening his grip and grinding his thumb into the juncture of muscle and bone. Harder. Laurent felt sick. Finally, he said, “ _Stop._ ”

Damen let go. Laurent wrenched back, instinctively, clutching his shoulder. He felt the wet stain of blood, the heat of it against his fingers, spreading from his shoulder to darken his finely laced jacket. He stared at Damen, heart racing. _Why_ —the question was on the tip of his tongue— _why not believe I betrayed you? What are you seeing, when you look at me like that?_

“You wouldn’t break an oath,” said Damen, voice thick with emotion. “Even to me.” 

He had stepped back. The tent was large enough to accommodate the movement, four paces between them. 

For a moment, Laurent couldn’t speak. Here it was: the moment that they had been hurtling inevitably toward since that first day in Arles. In another part of his mind, he felt the blood growing sticky on his fingers.

Laurent said, “Even to you?” 

Damen stared at him, features twisted. There was a dark swirl of emotion in his eyes—pain and sorrow, regret and fear, the sort of wariness with which a hunter approached a speared boar. 

_Say it,_ Laurent found himself thinking, _just say it._ He felt the presence of the lie between them like a stone on his chest, felt the desperate urge to crush it, to shatter it. Damen hesitated, gazing at him, and anger swelled. Damen had no right, now, to look at Laurent as he did—no right to the emotion that was like a knife in Laurent’s side. He had made his decision. He had embraced the lie, had used it, had embodied it. To hesitate in killing it—to act as if it meant something—was too great an insult. 

“I’ve come to tell you who I am.” 

Laurent could see that Damen thought it would hurt him, hurt them both, and held back the truth for this reason. But he no longer cared. He had already accepted the pain—let Damen feel it, too.

“I know who you are, Damianos,” said Laurent. 

He watched Damen absorb the words like a physical blow.

“Did you think,” said Laurent, and he could not keep the anger from his voice now, “I wouldn’t recognize the man who killed my brother?” 

His voice was perfectly steady. He could see each word as it met its mark, like arrows striking a target. Damen stepped back blindly, lips parted unconsciously in shock. 

“I knew in the palace when they dragged you in front of me,” said Laurent. He saw the pain it caused and continued on, steady, relentless. “I knew in the baths when I ordered you flayed. I knew—”

“At Ravenel?” said Damen. 

Laurent froze for a moment, breath stolen from his throat. Of course, _of course_ Damen would cling to the most vulnerable moment, the most beautiful memory, even as Laurent flung words like knives, meant only to injure. _Hate me,_ the thought was desperate, senseless, _You're supposed to hate me._

“If you knew,” said Damen, “how could you—”

“Let you fuck me?”

He could feel his own heart, a writhing creature in his chest. He ignored it. This was necessary. This was how things had to be. 

“I needed a victory at Charcy. You provided it. It was worth enduring,” Laurent spoke the terrible, lucid words, “your fumbling attentions for that.” 

It was a good excuse. It made sense, in a way. Laurent himself might have been able to believe it, except he hadn’t known about Charcy that night. Except he had thought Damen was leaving, that it was their last night together, that they might never see each other again. Except he had _wanted_ it, in a way he had never wanted anything, and he felt still the echo of it like an ache in his bones. 

It was a good excuse. But it was not good enough to fool either of them.

“You’re lying,” Damen said in a hollow voice, “You’re lying.” The words were too loud, tinged with desperation. “You thought I was leaving. You practically threw me out.” He said it as if only now realizing the truth of the words, “You knew who I was. You knew who I was the night we made love.”

The pain was transforming, easing, the brow furrowing. He stared at Laurent as if searching his face, searching beyond that, as if he could see through him. Laurent could see the memory of the night behind Damen’s eyes, transforming with new knowledge. 

“You weren’t making love to a slave, you were making love to _me._ ” 

_No, no I would never—it wasn’t—I didn’t_

“I thought you wouldn’t, I thought you’d never—” He took a step forward. “Laurent, six years ago, when I fought Auguste, I—”

“ _Don’t you say his name._ ” The words were raw, bloody, ripped from his chest. “Don’t you ever say his name, you _killed my brother_.” 

He was breathing rapidly, shallowly, almost panting. His hands were rigid on the edge of the table behind him, supporting his weight. 

“Is that what you want to hear, that I knew who you were and I still let you fuck me, my brother’s killer, who cut him down like an animal on the field?” 

_Auguste—Auguste, I’m sorry—_

“No,” said Damen, voice bewildered, “that isn’t—”

“Shall I ask you how you did it? What he looked like when your sword went in?” 

“ _No,_ ” said Damen. 

“Or shall I tell you about the illusion of the man who gave me good counsel. Who stood by me. Who never lied to me.” 

“ _I_ never lied to you.” 

The words were awful in the silence that followed them. 

“‘Laurent, I am your slave’?” said Laurent. The words were broken, jagged. 

Damen released his breath.

“Don’t,” he said, “talk about it like—”

“Like?”

“Like it was cold-blooded; like I controlled it. Like we didn’t both close our eyes and pretend I was a slave.” He hesitated, then spoke quietly, “I was your slave.” 

Laurent could see the painful vulnerability in Damen’s face, in his words. It was an offering, something tender and fragile and dangerous. It was too much. 

“There was no slave,” said Laurent. “He never existed. I don’t know what manner of man stands before me now. All I know is that I am facing him for the first time.” 

“He is here,” Damen insisted. “We are the same.” 

It was cruelty—to twist the knife of this truth that neither of them could dislodge. To ask Laurent to—ignore it, to act as if it didn’t exist. He felt himself sharpen with anger. 

“Kneel then,” his voice was cold, “Kiss my boot.” 

They gazed at each other. Damen’s expression was an open wound, exposing all the hurt beneath. He stared at Laurent with some bewildered accusation behind his eyes, as if it was Laurent who was insisting on denying some fundamental truth, and not the other way around. 

“You’re right. I’m not a slave,” Damen said, as his expression knit itself back together. “I am the King.” His voice hardened, though it was ragged in his throat. “I killed your brother. And now I hold your fort.” 

As he spoke, Damen drew out a knife. Laurent’s body tensed as his attention swung to the blade, heart racing with adrenaline as his body sensed the danger. But he kept his eyes on Damen. He did not look at the knife. 

“So you will parley with me as with a king, and you will tell me why you called me here.” 

Deliberately, Damen tossed the knife onto the floor of the tent. Laurent did not allow his eyes to follow its path. He held his gaze steady. 

“Didn’t you know?” said Laurent. “My uncle is in Akielos.” 


	4. Chapter Four

“Laurent,” Damen said, “ _what have you done?_ ”

As if he controlled his uncle’s actions. As if he had somehow known all along the Regent’s true plan. Here, then, was what Damen really thought of him. Laurent bristled.

“Does it bother you to think of him hurting your country?”

“You know it does. Are we playing now with the fate of nations? It won’t bring your brother back.” 

Damen could be cruel, when he wanted to be. But then, Laurent had already known that. There was a violent silence.

“You know, my uncle knew who you were,” said Laurent. “He spent this whole time waiting for us to fuck. He wanted to tell me who you were himself, and watch it wreck me.” 

As he said the words, Damen’s anger twisted into guilt, something pleading in his eyes. He had known, then—understood exactly the sort of pain it would cause. Laurent felt his own heart harden.

“Oh, had you guessed that? You just thought you’d fuck me anyway? Couldn’t help yourself?” 

“You ordered me to your rooms,” said Damen, “and pushed me down on the bed. I said, _‘Don’t do this._ ’”

“You _said,_ ‘Kiss me,’” said Laurent, each word enunciated clearly. “You said, ‘Laurent, I need to be inside you, you feel so good, Laurent,’” He switched to Akielon, as Damen had, at the climax, “it’s never felt like this, I can’t hold on, I’m going to—”

“ _Stop_ ,” said Damen. He was breathing in quick, shallow breaths, as he might after heavy exertion. He stared at Laurent. 

“Charcy,” said Laurent, “was a distraction. I have it from Guion. My uncle sailed for Ios three days ago, and by now he has made landfall.” 

Damen moved three steps away, features contorted with pain. He braced his hand against one of the tent poles, unsteady. Yet his voice, when he spoke, was even.

“I see. And my men are to die fighting him for you, the way that they did at Charcy?” 

Laurent smiled coldly. “On that table is a list of supplies and troops. I will give it to you, in support of your campaign to the south.”

“In exchange for,” said Damen, steadily. 

“Delpha,” said Laurent in the same tone. He used the Akielon name for the province.

Damen responded with shock, pulling back physically as if Laurent had struck him. The province of Delpha belonged to the kyros Nikandros, who had already pledged his forces to assist Laurent in exchange for information about the Regent’s coup. It was Nikandros’ army that had fought and died at Charcy. He would now be wary of Laurent, mistrustful. He would trust Laurent even less if forced to give up his home. 

Yet Laurent was set on this course of action. Delpha was valuable in its own right, richly fertile, with a strong seaport. It had symbolic value, too, as the site of Akielos’ greatest victory, and Vere’s greatest defeat. Its return would strengthen Laurent’s position, and weaken Damen’s. It was the leverage he would need to stand against the Akielon king, once they defeated the Regent and Damen returned to his throne. 

It was more than that, too. Laurent’s heart clutched like a fist when he thought of allying himself with his brother’s killer. He could not bring back Auguste, but he could take back what his brother had lost that day at Marlas. He could take back Delfeur. 

Laurent could see the ultimatum tearing itself apart in Damen’s mind. He had not come prepared to negotiate—foolish. Laurent felt an almost defensive resentment at the shock with which Damen regarded him. What had he expected? A joyful reunion? They had both always known there would be a day that they would face each other as the Prince of Vere and the King of Akielos. The men who had woken in each other’s arms at Ravenel—those men were dead. If Damen wished to mourn them, he could do so later. Laurent had no time for such niceties. He had nine more months to survive. 

Damen said, “ _Did you plan this from the beginning?_ ” 

Again, there was the tone of betrayal—as if every interaction they had ever had was calculated, cold, some elaborate act on the part of Laurent. Perhaps it was better if Damen believed that, though it made something kick in Laurent’s chest. 

“The hard part was getting Guion to let me into his fort.” He said it steadily. Let Damen think him a monster, then. They would be two monsters, equally matched. They could burn in hell together when all this was over. 

Damen said, “In the palace you had me beaten, drugged, whipped. And you ask me to give up Delpha? Why don’t you tell me instead why I shouldn’t simply hand you over to your uncle, in exchange for his aid against Kastor?” 

“Because I knew who you were,” said Laurent, “and when you killed Touars and humiliated my uncle’s faction, I sent news of it echoing to every corner of my country. So that if you ever crawled back onto your throne there would be no possibility of an alliance between you and my uncle. Do you want to play this game against me? I will take you apart.” 

“Take me apart?” Damen said deliberately. “If I opposed you, the remaining scrap of land you hold would have a different enemy on each side, and your efforts would be split in three directions.”

“Believe me,” said Laurent, “when I say that you would have my undivided attention.”

Damen gave him a hard, appraising look, eyes passing over his body. 

“You’re alone. You don’t have allies. You don’t have friends. You’ve proven true everything your uncle ever said about you. You made deals with Akielos. You even bedded an Akielon—and by now, everyone knows it. You’re clinging to independence with a single fort and the tatters of a reputation.”

Each word was like a blow, a cold and pointed summary of Laurent’s position. “So let me tell you the terms of this alliance. You will give me everything on this list, and in return I will aid you against your uncle. Delpha remains with Akielos. Let’s not pretend you have anything here worth a bargain.” 

There was a silence after he spoke. Laurent felt rage like acid, burning in his veins. But he remained cool, untouchable. 

“There’s something else I have,” said Laurent, “that you want.” 

He paused for a moment, studying Damen. He saw the familiar furrow of the brow, the slight parting of lips, the question that appeared behind the dark eyes. Damen’s gaze was suddenly heavy.

“Guion,” said Laurent, “has agreed to testify in writing to the details of the deal that he brokered between Kastor and my uncle during his time as Ambassador.”

Damen flushed. It was not what he had expected Laurent to say, and Laurent knew it. For a moment, what was unsaid hung thickly between them.

“Please,” said Laurent, “insult me further. Tell me more about my tattered reputation. Tell me all the ways that bending over for you has damaged my position. As if being fucked into the mattress by the King of Akielos could be anything other than demeaning. I am dying to hear it.” 

“Laurent—”

“Did you think,” said Laurent, “that I would come here without the means to enforce my terms? I hold the only proof of Kastor’s treachery that extends beyond your word.” 

“My word is enough to the men that matter.”

“Is it? Then by all means, reject my offer. I will execute Guion for treason and hold the letter over the nearest candle.” 

Damen’s hands became fists. Laurent could feel the tension like a knife edge, like a blade against his neck. Damen was right: he was bargaining alone, with very little, for his political life. If he allied himself with the King of Akielos, all of Vere would resent him—even if he managed to beat his uncle. Retrieving Delfeur without bloodshed was the only thing that might redeem him enough to actually rule his country when he clawed his way onto the throne. And it all depended on the decision of Damen, who stared at him now like a kicked dog.

“Are we going to play another kind of pretend?” Damen said. “That it never happened?”

“If you are concerned it will go unmentioned between us, never fear. Every man in my camp knows that you served me in bed.” 

“And that is how it is to be between us?” said Damen. “Mercenary? Cold?” 

The words were harsh, but the question behind them was vulnerable in a violent way, in a way that tore the air from Laurent’s lungs.

“How did you think it would be?” said Laurent. “You’d take me to your bed for the public consummation?” He instilled as much venom as he could into the words, hoping it was enough to cover the ache that lay behind them.

Damen said, “I won’t do this without Nikandros, and he won’t give up Delpha.”

“He will when you give him Ios.”

Laurent had already considered it—had thought through this meeting a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. Nikandros was fiercely loyal to Damianos—he had been willing to risk treason to assist the Veretian prince, just for evidence of Kastor’s betrayal against the true king. He was the perfect candidate for kyros of Ios, once Damen took the throne. 

“I see you’ve thought of everything,” said Damen, bitterly. “It didn’t have to be—you could have come to me, and asked for my help, I would have—”

“Killed the rest of my family?”

Laurent said it standing straight-backed before the table, his gaze unwavering. He could feel his muscles trembling with exhaustion, the wound in his shoulder still shuddering with blood. _It had to be this way_. He had already resigned himself to this fact—it was time for Damen to understand it, too. 

And yet—it still hurt, some small piece of him twisting desperately in pain at the promise in those words: _it didn’t have to be—_

It did. It did, and there was no use pretending anything else.

“Congratulations,” said Damen. “You’ve forced my hand. You have what you want. Delpha, in exchange for your aid in the south. Nothing given freely, nothing done out of feeling, everything coerced, with bloodless planning.” 

“Then I have your agreement? Say it.”

“You have my agreement.” 

“Good,” said Laurent. He took a step back. Then, as his control dissolved and the exhaustion overwhelmed him, he surrendered his full weight to the table behind him, his arms shaking. His entire body was trembling; he could feel the prickle of sweat along his hairline. He said: “Now get out.”

***

Laurent sat, once more, alone.

He could not seem to stop trembling—a result of exhaustion, of straining his injured body to its limits, and nothing more. Numbly, he lifted a hand to touch his shoulder. The cloth of his jacket was still damp, sticky with blood. He would need to return to the physician to have the wound cleaned and bandaged again.

In the grip of exhaustion, it was harder to hold back the clamoring swell of emotion. Laurent felt himself flush, ashamed at the childish mix of guilt and longing that churned in his gut. He had always known this was going to happen, one way or another. The moment Damen reassumed his mantle, and became King Damianos, prince-killer—they would be enemies, once more.

He had known, but he had thought it would happen differently. It was true, what Damen had said: _You thought I was leaving. You practically threw me out._ Laurent had expected a clean break, a single moment in which they would sever themselves from one another. Damen’s transformation would be a quiet, drawn-out thing, something that happened across the border, outside of Laurent’s purview. He would hear news of Damianos’ return, of Akielos swept up into civil war. They would fight their battles separately, and then—if they both managed to claw, bloody and desperate, onto their respective thrones—one day, maybe, they would meet again in battle. He would see Damen across the field, armored as he was today, eyes flashing under the helm, the way he remembered from Marlas. The way he always looked in Laurent's nightmares. Laurent would kill his way across the field, would fight, a ringing engagement, with every muscle and sinew primed for its purpose: to defeat Damianos. He would raise his sword high, would bring it down in a flash of steel—

Perhaps Damen would raise his arm, in self-defense. In Laurent’s imagination, there was no layer of gauntlet covering skin, only bare wrists, and there, on the left, a flash of gold—

He shut his eyes, pressing the palms of his hands into his sockets. It was all he had ever wanted. Yet now, picturing it, he felt his stomach turn. The all-consuming need for revenge that had driven him, had sustained him, had at some crucial juncture fractured, pieces breaking away like the thin layer of an eggshell.

It did not matter now. There would be no clean break, no separate wars—the Regent had seen to that. Instead, they would remain tethered, tied together inextricably by his uncle’s poisonous schemes.

Laurent reminded himself, numbly, that he had just accomplished what every other member of his family had failed to do: he had secured Delfeur. The province would return, rightfully, to Vere, after six years of Akielon rule. The last thing Auguste had done with his life was protect it—he had died, and his death had meant failure, had meant innumerable Veretians dead or displaced. Now, without spilling any further blood, Laurent had won it back. Where Auguste had failed, he had succeeded. He should be proud, ecstatic—at the very least, he should be satisfied. Yet there was only a bleak hollowness to the victory.

He thought of Damen, of the wounded betrayal that had twisted his features as he looked at Laurent _._ It had been—unexpected. Laurent had been prepared for the anger, for the spite, for the cold rebuke as he negotiated for Delfeur. Laurent had expected that Damen would barge into the tent, furious, demanding explanation for his abandonment at Charcy.

But he had not expected the tender, fragile hope behind Damen’s eyes as he said _I was your slave._ He had not been prepared to defend himself against such an attack—against that painful, foolish fantasy that there might be some other way forward, some means of salvaging the delicate thing that had blossomed at Nesson, at Acquitart, at Ravenel. He had not expected Damen’s thumb, pressing into his wounded shoulder.

Vaguely, Laurent allowed his hand to drop from his arm, the fingertips stained red. He stared at them, and thought to himself that the surrender of Delfeur had not been entirely bloodless, after all.

***

He called for a physician to attend to his shoulder. The man who arrived at his tent frowned when he saw the open wound, but made no comment. He worked quickly and diligently, fingers moving with trained professionalism as he cleaned the blood and smeared a salve over the torn skin, wrapping fresh bandages around Laurent’s arm.

When it was done, Laurent dismissed the physician and sat, half undressed, trailing his fingers over the edges of the new bandage. He picked up his jacket from where he had dropped it, studying the bloodstain that had dyed the fine fabric. He did nothing but stare at it, for a moment, before discarding the ruined clothing once more and summoning a servant to bring a fresh shirt and jacket.

Dressed immaculately once more and with all signs of the bandaged wound on his shoulder concealed under cloth, Laurent received a steady stream of reports from heralds. An Akielon city of tents had risen up to mirror the Veretian one; every man in Laurent’s company was on edge, unsure of the reason for the sudden arrival of their new neighbors. If an Akielon threw a pebble, the entire army would launch into action.

Laurent called for Enguerran, who confirmed that the men—although skittish—were on their best behavior. He relayed information about their stores and supplies, the number of men, the quality of horses, the various defensive measures set in place around the camp. In sum, Laurent had a disciplined army at his fingertips, ready for war.

Enguerran was a good captain, a career soldier. Though he had served previously under Lord Touars and the Regent’s faction, his loyalty to Laurent had become absolute after learning of the Regent’s treachery. He was a traditional man, and his loyalty was to the Veretian crown.

However, he was also the previous captain of a border lord, who had learned almost from birth to hate Akielons and had spent much of his adult life fighting them. Enguerran could not entirely hide his disgust when Laurent explained that their primary ally was to be Damianos prince-killer, the Akielon King.

“The men will never accept it.”

“They will.”

“Your Highness, most of these soldiers are border men. They have been raised to fight Akielons—many of them fought at Marlas—”

“I fought at Marlas.”

Laurent’s voice was even, the words clipped. Enguerran fell silent, face pinched.

There was a quiet moment in which they stared at each other. Eventually, the captain dropped his eyes to the ground.

Laurent said, “We will assist the Akielon King in his campaign against his brother and my uncle. Once both traitors have been dealt with, Delfeur will return to Veretian rule.”

Enguerran looked up sharply, eyes wide.

“Delfeur?”

“Yes.”

Now Enguerran was studying Laurent, appraising, a new sort of wariness in his gaze. Laurent stared back coolly, raising a single brow.

“The men?”

“They will not like it. They will undoubtedly talk…about the rumors that have been spread. It will please many of them, to know you have kept the King of Akielos as a slave. But others…might suspect that your uncle’s claims were true. That you have been in league with Akielos since the beginning.” Enguerran’s gaze was scrutinizing. It was clear that he was not entirely devoid of doubts himself. Still, with Guion’s testimony it was undeniable to all those Veretians at Fortaine that the Regent had committed treason. This alone should be sufficient to hold their loyalty, despite Laurent’s own ties to Akielos.

Enguerran continued speaking. “Still, a great number of these men fought at Marlas—many lived in Delfeur, or had families that did. I think, in light of the terms, they will understand that this alliance is in Vere’s best interest.”

Laurent nodded. “See to it that they do.”

Enguerran bowed, understanding the dismissal, and turned. He had just lifted the canvas flap of the tent when Laurent’s voice stopped him.

“Captain.”

Enguerran released the canvas and turned, hovering by the opening.

“Yes, Your Highness?”

“I was informed that there was a company of Veretian men who rode to Charcy.”

The captain nodded, once. “Yes, Your Highness. Twenty men. I believe thirteen survived.”

Laurent released a breath. S _even men_. Seven dead because he had failed to anticipate his uncle’s moves, had failed to suspect an ambush until it was too late. It was nothing—not compared to the thousands of others that had lost their lives. Still, the number lodged itself in Laurent’s mind, a stone around which the rest of his thoughts swirled like water.

“And the survivors?”

“They rode with the Akielons to Fortaine. They are here, now, camped with the rest of the men.”

“Who led them?” Laurent asked the question, even as he knew the answer.

“Jord.”

Laurent pressed his eyes closed, briefly. He had not seen Jord since that night in the tower, restrained by Damen’s arms, begging Laurent to stop as he cut Aimeric into tiny, bloody pieces. _You cold-blooded son of a bitch._

“Send him to me. After you speak with the men.” Laurent’s voice was steady, detached, as he gave the command. Enguerran opened his mouth, as if to speak—but only nodded. This time, Laurent did not stop him as he left.

***

The sun was low in the sky by the time Jord arrived. A servant had already lit the braziers in Laurent’s tent. When Jord stepped through the canvas flap, he was silhouetted for a moment by the fading orange daylight, blurring the edges of his form.

“Your Highness,” said Jord. He bowed. His face was wiped blank of emotion, but his shoulders were a tense line.

“Jord,” said Laurent.

They regarded each other. Jord had, at some point, removed his armor, so that he stood before Laurent now in plain riding clothes. Still, there was a sword slung around his waist, and his eyes were guarded.

“You rode to Charcy,” said Laurent. The words were spoken in a neutral tone, but they could both understand the questions underlying the surface of the speech.

“Yes,” said Jord, stiffly.

There was a careful silence. Laurent did not speak, only studied Jord, who gazed back at him with a sort of weary confusion, as if he could not understand why Laurent had called him there.

“Tell me what happened,” Laurent said, “at Ravenel.”

Jord did not have to ask what he meant. He took a sharp breath, frowning, and began to speak.

“We thought the Akielons an enemy force, at first. Until Damen ordered us to let them in. He said they were our reinforcements. We opened the gate. The man who led the army—the kyros—recognized Damen.”

Here, Jord paused apprehensively, studying Laurent’s face. Laurent kept his expression carefully composed, revealing nothing. At this juncture, Damen’s true identity was known by every man in the camp. Enguerran would have already announced their alliance with the Akielon King. But the only person who knew what Laurent had known—that he had recognized Damianos the moment their eyes met in Arles—was Damen. Laurent saw no reason to explain to anyone else why he had kept this knowledge a secret for so long.

“He said he was Damianos. He bowed, and then the whole army fell to their knees. The men were appalled, frightened. Some drew their swords, though we were so far outnumbered we would have been slaughtered in the first minutes of battle. Damen—Damianos—took the fort by force.”

“And then?”

“I was brought to him. And Guymar. He offered us—a choice.”

“A choice?”

“He told us,” Jord said, “that we could remain prisoners at Ravenel, or join him to fight at Charcy.”

Laurent absorbed that. Jord watched him.

“We were well treated,” he said, quietly.

“You fought,” said Laurent.

“I fought.”

They gazed at each other. Jord had come to the palace because of Auguste—recommended to one of the Captains by Laurent's brother. He was a modest man, of common birth, not trained by any of the master swordsmen that nobles hired to practice with their sons. Yet his skill with a blade was unparalleled—almost. Amongst the men, he remained undefeated.

After Auguste’s death, what was left of the prince’s guard—those who had not been cut down on the field by Damianos—defected, almost entirely, to the Regent. All the men Auguste had recommended to the palace suddenly, instead of blue, wore red. Laurent’s uncle had assured him that there was no need to trouble himself with maintaining a guard; after all, he was perfectly safe so long as he stayed in the palace. So long as he stayed, obediently, by the Regent’s side.

Jord did not seek a position in the Regent’s guard. He remained, working at the palace, living in the regular barracks. He exhibited no ambition for social climbing, intent with his position as it was. When Laurent was fifteen and re-forming the prince’s guard, Jord was the first man he approached.

Laurent remembered that period of time, how lost he had felt, how alone. His uncle had grown cold, distant, and he had only just begun to puzzle out why. He had only just begun to understand himself not as a child, not as a beloved nephew, but as something that had been used up, broken and discarded. The world had pressed in at him from all sides, the crushing pressure of responsibility suddenly heavy against his back.

He had approached Jord personally, tilting his chin arrogantly as he strode into the barracks. He remembered the rapid beat of his heart as he stared down a man much older than him, half expecting some sort of scorn or incredulity at his request. Yet Jord had responded without hesitation, agreeing almost immediately when Laurent said _I want you for my prince’s guard._ It was the first small victory in the long battle against his uncle, the first time Laurent had felt that he might be able to stand, on his own, without any help.

Almost six years, they had been together. Fought together. He had trusted Jord perhaps more than anyone else at the palace. The space between them now was made all of jagged edges.

“King Damianos is to be our primary ally in this war against my uncle,” Laurent said. His tone was nonchalant, bored. Jord blinked, surprised.

“Our—ally?”

“Yes. In exchange for Delfeur, we will assist him in his campaign to retake the throne from his brother. My uncle, it seems, has thrown in his lot with Kastor. It is the natural course of action that we oppose them both.”

“Delfeur,” Jord breathed, incredulous. His eyes moved across Laurent’s face, questioning. “I thought—”

“That I would kill him? Demand a duel, perhaps, for my brother’s sake? But then I would be fighting two wars, and the chances of victory are so much more favorable if I am only fighting one.”

Jord remained silent, frowning. Yet there was no accusation in his eyes, as there had been in Enguerran’s. Only a wordless quest for understanding.

“Why did you ride to Charcy?” Laurent said.

The words fell into the silence between them, heavy.

“I am loyal to my Prince,” said Jord. The words were stiff—his entire body was stiff.

Laurent said, “I killed Aimeric.”

Jord did not try to deny it. He did not attempt to prettify what they both knew to be true. He only said, “I know.”

“Yet you remain in my service.”

“Yes.”

“And how, exactly, should I be expected to trust you? If my uncle sends another boy to bat his lashes, will you roll over for him, too?”

“No.” The word was forced out through gritted teeth.

“You think I am callous, and cold, and cruel,” Laurent said, voice rising with emotion that he could not entirely repress, “You think that I killed your lover over nothing more than petty spite. _Why did you ride to Charcy?_ ”

“Because—” said Jord, the word coming out in a burst of desperate volume. Laurent fell silent, staring at him. “Because,” Jord said again, “I want him dead.”

Laurent did not have to ask who he was speaking about.

They were silent once more, gazing at each other. Two pairs of eyes, searching each other’s faces. When Laurent spoke again, he did not attempt to hide the weariness that colored his voice.

“There will be no more second chances.”

“I know,” said Jord. Laurent nodded. Then:

“You will report to Enguerran, with the rest of the men. Do not let me down again.”


	5. Chapter Five

Of course, a verbal agreement spoken alone, in a tent with only the two of them, was not enough. The announcement had to be made the next morning, on a grander scale, both armies bearing witness to the alliance.

Heralds had been galloping back and forth between their camps since before dawn. The preparations for this announcement had been developed before the camp stirred in grey light. Meetings of this kind often took months to arrange; it would be difficult for any man to orchestrate a peaceful negotiation in which two armies who for years had wanted nothing more than to spill each other’s blood might meet. Luckily, Laurent was not just any man.

They would meet in the Akielon command pavilion, draped all in red like an open wound. Laurent had already informed his men of the alliance; they had swallowed it, able to stomach it only because they knew at the end of it all would be Delfeur. This meeting was a formality, protocol, more than anything meant to ensure that the Akielons would keep their word. That Damianos would keep his word.

Laurent rode at the head of the procession, laced severely into his fine Veretian clothing, gold circlet catching the sunlight that fell across his forehead. The blue banners streamed behind him, the gold starburst a bright spot of pain that made his breath catch in his throat.

The starburst had always been the symbol of the Veretian crown. His father had flown these banners, and his grandfather. Yet to Laurent, they would forever be Auguste’s more than anyone else’s. There had been no one else who embodied so well everything the symbol represented; Auguste’s eyes the same dark blue as the cloth, he himself golden and shining as the sun. Though he held himself regally, chin raised, insouciant, Laurent could not erase the grimy layer of sediment over his thoughts that insisted he was nothing more than an echo of a better man.

The last time Akielon and Veretian royalty had met ceremonially had been six years ago, at Marlas, when his uncle had surrendered to Damen’s father, King Theomedes. Laurent had not been present, unable to move from where he lay, hollowed out, an empty, cracking shell in a silken tent. Thirteen and unmoored, everything tethering him cut brutally away: mother, brother, father—until the only thing left tying him to the earth was his uncle, who returned to the tent with his head bowed and told Laurent the Akielon King had given them permission to bury Auguste’s body.

At first, Laurent had been angry—so angry he thought it would swallow him, anger with sharp teeth, anger that drew blood. He’d pounded his trembling fists against his uncle’s shoulders, his arms, his torso, screaming _how could you, how could you, you should have killed him_ until the tears were so thick in his eyes it was like the whole world was underwater. And then he’d collapsed, shaking, and his uncle didn’t do anything except hold him, and his arms were gentle and warm and almost like Auguste. He’d let Laurent cry and murmured, _I know,_ and Laurent had realized that his uncle was the only person in the world who might understand some small piece of the misery that was digesting him. He’d lost a brother, too, after all.

They approached the Akielon army that stood, stiff and formal, fifteen hundred men in disciplined lines. They formed a two-block formation, with a clear path through their center that led right to the base of matching oak thrones. Sitting in one was Damianos, the King of Akielos.

He was dressed, as before, in Akielon clothing. Not outfitted for war, but still lightly armored, the metal glinting in the sun, the cape across his shoulders spilling red across his back. The sandals twisted their way around powerful calves; the sleeveless garments left bare the sun-browned arms. The golden cuff lay exposed on his wrist.

It was not like the ecstatic entries Laurent had made into the towns and villages of Vere. No one swooned or cheered or threw flowers at his feet. The camp was silent. The Akielon soldiers watched him ride through the center of their ranks towards the pavilion, marked out in sunlight, their armor and sharpened blades and points of spears glinting; polished after having been so recently used to kill.

He wondered, briefly, if it had been like this for his uncle. The heaviness of all those hundreds of eyes, the repressed violence that tasted like iron in the air. A bead of sweat crawled down his back like a beetle. For just a moment, Laurent was thirteen again, that shattered, desperate boy staring at the face of every nightmare he had had for the past seven years.

And then he banished it—the fear, the disgust, every emotion that pressed against the inside of his skull like a headache. He rode forward alone, with nothing but pure, insolent grace, body all hard lines. Past every armored soldier, every glinting blade, every hard gaze. Laurent dismounted and swung down off his horse, tossing the reins to a servant. He could feel the attention of every man at his back, sharp as a thousand arrowheads, prickling against his skin.

Damen stood up.

The whole tent reacted, the men standing, shifting, lowering their eyes for the King. Laurent strolled in, casually, acutely aware of the wary shock that his presence elicited from these men, ignoring it. He came down the path that was cleared for him, airy and indifferent, as easy as if he were strolling through the palace gardens at Arles instead of a tent full of men who watched him as a cat might watch a rat—claws at the edges of fingertips, waiting to kill.

“My brother of Akielos,” said Laurent.

Damen met his eyes with a flat gaze, cold and hard as stone. Everyone knew that in the Akielon language, princes of foreign nations addressed each other in the fraternal.

“Our brother of Vere,” said Damen.

Laurent’s entourage had followed behind, hovering near the entrance of the pavilion—liveried servants and a few select men, including several courtiers from Fortaine. His Captain, Enguerran, was among then, as was Guion. Laurent watched Damen’s eyes rake over them, assessing.

Damen lifted his hand, offering it palm up, with fingers outstretched. Laurent lifted his own hand calmly, resting it atop Damen’s. Their fingers met.

He could feel the eyes of every Akielon in the tent on him. They proceeded slowly. Damen’s fingers rested infinitesimally below his own. He felt the moment when the men around them realized was going to happen.

Reaching the dais, they sat, facing outwards, the twin oak seats now twin thrones.

Shock; it travelled like a wave over the men and women in the tent; out, over the gathered ranks of soldiers. From the reaction, Laurent surmised that Damen had elected not to warn his camp, to instead simply present the Veretian prince who had left them to die at Charcy and say _here is our brother._

Everyone could see where Laurent and Damen sat: side by side. It was a position that marked them as equals, neither with any power over the other.

“We have called you here today to witness our accord,” said Damen, in a clear voice that carried over the noise. “Today we mark the alliance of our nation against those pretenders and usurpers who seek to assail our thrones.”

Laurent settled into his seat with purposeful nonchalance, adopting the posture he typically favored: one leg straight out before him, a single wrist balanced on the arm of the throne.

Explosions of outrage, furious exclamations, there were hands on the hilts of swords. Laurent’s heart was screaming in his chest, trying desperately to flee his body. Yet he kept his face an unbroken mask of cool indifference. He had suspected that something like this might happen—had anticipated it. Had prepared for it.

“In Vere, it is customary to bestow a gift on a favored companion,” said Laurent in Akielon. “Vere therefore offers this gift to Akielos, as a symbol of our alliance, now and in all the days to come.” His fingers lifted. A Veretian servant came forward, a cushion resting like a platter on his outstretched forearm.

Laurent felt, more than saw, Damen’s reaction, the tension transmitting itself through his body, tangible in the air between them. He felt his own body tense in response, forced his shoulders to relax. Next to him, Damen sucked in a single breath of air.

Coiled and personal, Laurent’s gift was a Veretian whip, made of gold.

It had been carefully planned, precisely crafted. Laurent had always had an eye for detail. There was the carved golden handle, the rich ruby inset distinctively into its base, held in the jaws of a great cat. Laurent remembered the handler’s rod, in the palace at Arles, with those same carvings. The thin gold chain that had dripped towards the collar around Damen’s neck. The whip was a tombstone, a ghost of their shared past, unyielding on the soft pillow.

He remembered the way that gold had felt under his fingers, the satisfying weight of it, the tug of the chain. Every moment of cruelty, hardened into the kernel of that ruby. He remembered his own hands, tangled in the chain, his own voice, tangled in the fall of the whip. That anger like acid in his veins, the gnawing hunger of his desire to _hurt_ something.

Next to him, Damen’s breathing had changed. Laurent could sense the shift, the weight of those flashing eyes, as Damen turned to look at him. He did not return the gaze.

Outside the tent, it had already started.

Veretian attendants were placing a series of ten ornamental whipping blocks at even intervals outside of the pavilion. Ten men were pulled like sacks of grain from their horses by Veretian handlers, stripped, then bound.

Inside the tent, Akielon men and women were looking at one another questioningly, others craning their necks to see.

In front of the gathered army, the ten captives were shoved towards the blocks, stumbling a little, their balance precarious, their hands tied behind their backs.

“These are the men who attacked the Akielon village of Tarasis,” said Laurent. “They are clan mercenaries, paid for by my uncle, who killed your people in an attempt to wreck the peace between our nations.”

He had the attention of the tent now. The eyes of every Akielon were on him, from the soldiers to the officers—even the generals. He recognized the general Makedon, and his soldiers, who had seen the destruction at Tarasis first-hand. Who had metastasized the violence, slaughtering the people of Breteau in cold-blooded retaliation.

“The whip and the men are Vere’s gift to Akielos,” said Laurent, and then he turned his eyes to Damen. Damen was not looking at the men. He was not looking at anything except Laurent, who for a split-second felt his voice dying in his throat. But he pressed on: “The first fifty lashes are my gift to you.”

Damen couldn’t have stopped it, even if he had wanted to. The atmosphere in the pavilion was thick with satisfaction and approval. The Akielons wanted it, appreciated it, appreciated Laurent for it. _Bloodthirsty—_ his father’s voice rang in his ears— _barbarians._ These were men who spoke the language of violence like a prayer. Damen could not stop Laurent from bowing his head and worshiping with them.

The Veretian handlers were hammering the whipping blocks into the earth, and then jerking at them to test that they would hold weight.

Laurent could see the repressed disgust behind Damen’s eyes, the accusatory note of betrayal in the twist of his lips. He braced himself against it. Their long ride to Ravenel had softened Laurent, had left him—vulnerable—in unacceptable ways. He could afford no weakness. It was softness that had killed Nicaise.

So he would be cruel, now, if it meant preserving his life. If it meant preserving the lives of his men. If it meant some small scrap of power that he could use to drag himself through this fight with his uncle—even if that power was only the ghost of a chain in a faraway palace, the echo of a whip resounding off the backs of these men. Laurent would remind Damen, forcefully, that he was in control.

Yet it turned his stomach to become once more that venomous creature he had been in Arles—and that, too, was weakness. He was beginning to lose track of all the ways in which he made himself sick.

Damen said, “Vere is generous.” His voice was hollow, cavernous.

“After all,” Laurent held his gaze, refused to look away from those wounded eyes, “I remember what you like.”

The stripped men were tied down.

The Veretian handlers took up position, each standing by one of the bound prisoners, each holding a whip. The call went out. Laurent composed himself. Together, they would watch as these men were flayed alive.

“Furthermore,” said Laurent, his voice pitched to carry, “Fortaine’s bounty is yours. Its physicians will tend to your wounded. Its storehouses will feed your men. The Akielon victory at Charcy was hard-won. All that Vere gained while you fought is yours, and it is deserved. I will not profit from any hardship that befalls the rightful King of Akielos or his people.”

It was a careful line to walk. Akielons already thought poorly of Veretians, and Laurent had lost the respect of these men when he had failed to appear at Charcy. If this alliance was to work, he would need to win back, piece by piece, their esteem.

It took a long time. Fifty lashes, brought with effort of shoulder and arm down onto a man’s unprotected back, was a protracted undertaking. Laurent sat, silently, and watched. In every meeting of coiled whip against bare skin was the ghost of the past. He did not look at Damen, though every nerve of his body stood on end, aware of the man sitting next to him.

Laurent’s thoughts spiraled back in time, to the day he had ordered Damen tied to the post. How violence had danced in his blood, mind all on killing. The grim satisfaction of seeing the face of his brother’s killer, contorted in pain. The hollow feeling after, where he had thought there would be—something else. Not happiness, exactly but…gratification. Instead there was only a pit in his stomach. He felt that same emptiness now, watching ten men howl and bleed and cry.

Bloody and pulped, the men, who were no longer men, were cut from the whipping blocks. That took time too, because more than one handler was needed to lift each man, and no one was quite certain which of the men were unconscious and which were dead.

Damen said, “We have a personal gift too.”

The eyes of those in the tent turned to him. His face was a placid mask, statuesque and carved. It was impossible to look at him and see anything other than King. Yet Laurent, who had spent weeks studying that face, committing each tiny expression to memory, could see the tells—the tiny beads of sweat along his hairline, the way his shoulders turned forward, just the slightest bit. That echo of pain behind the dark, exquisite eyes.

Laurent’s gift had hurt him. It had been intended to hurt him. The guilt that raked claws across his throat now, catching his breath, had no place in his body—yet he could not entirely exorcise it. His gift had forestalled any open revolt, and he knew that was why Damen had swallowed it. But there was still a rift between Akielos and Vere.

It was Damen’s turn to cement the alliance between their nations. Laurent’s pulse kicked under his skin.

“Every man here knows that you kept us as a slave,” said Damen. He said it loudly enough that all those gathered in the pavilion tent could hear. There was no shame in his voice—only raw, commanding power. It was impossible to imagine him a slave; it bordered on ludicrous. “We wear your cuff on our wrist. But today, the Prince of Vere will prove himself our equal.”

_No._

Damen gestured and one of his squires came forward. He carried a small bundle, the shape clear beneath the fall of cloth. Laurent kept his face expressionless, though his heart had twisted itself into knots.

Damen said, “You asked for it, once.” His voice was quiet, this time—the words were for Laurent, and no one else.

The squire drew back the cloth to reveal a gold cuff. Laurent held his own body still, his muscles strained like trapped animals, desperate to flee. The cuff, unmistakably, was the twin to the one Damen wore, altered by a blacksmith for Laurent’s finer wrist.

Damen said, “Wear it for me.”

 _You should give me the other._ Laurent remembered his own words, painfully vulnerable, a fragile admission. He remembered every swell of emotion he had felt as he said them—the tenderness, the desperate gratitude, how his heart had ached and he had wanted it to never stop aching, because Damen had chosen to keep this piece of them, permanently, on his body. He remembered the way that cuff had rested, heavy across his shoulder when he woke in Damen’s arms, remembered how it had flashed in the torchlight as Damen moved his hands, weighed down with gold and yet so gentle that it was almost unbearable. No one had ever touched him like that—like it meant something.

And now that sweet, blooming thing had been sharpened and thorned and used against him. That tender, private moment made suddenly cold, public. It was a violation of something sacred, something Laurent had kept, secretly, tucked close to his heart.

It was for the best. To hold on to sentiment was to hold on to weakness. Laurent told himself this as he extended his hand. He had no right to—keep this, to protect it, that precious moment when he had wanted nothing more than some physical token of what had transpired between them, afraid that once Damen left it might dissipate, as if it had never happened. He waited, palm outstretched, his eyes lifting to meet Damen’s.

Laurent said, “Put it on me.”

Every pair of eyes in the tent was on them. Damen took Laurent’s wrist in his hand. He would have to unlace the fabric and push the sleeve back.

Laurent could feel the devouring gazes of the Akielons in the tent, as hungry for this as they had been for the whipping. It was not difficult to imagine the outrage, the shame they had felt upon learning their King had been a slave—a slave to their nation’s worst enemy. To see the Veretian Prince wear the gold cuff of a palace bed slave in turn would be shocking, intimate, a symbol of Damen’s ownership. This gift, too, had been carefully selected.

Damen lifted the cuff, the golden curve cupped in the palm of his hand. Hundreds of images flashed in Laurent’s mind, pictures of pets and masters, trinkets and jewelry passed between hands. The way he had found Nicaise, crying, ears bloody where they had been pierced through. Ten years old and not yet used to pain. His uncle’s hands, affixing earrings to the wounds. He knew the Veretian men would see it, too, the ritual repeated so often, of master and pet, of gifts and ownership. His pulse was rabbit-fast under Damen’s thumb.

“My throne for your throne,” Damen said. He pushed back the fabric. It was more bare skin than Laurent had ever shown in public, on display to the entire tent. “Help me regain my kingdom, and I’ll see you King of Vere.” Damen fitted the cuff to Laurent’s left wrist.

“I’m overjoyed to wear a gift that reminds me of you,” said Laurent. The cuff locked into place. He didn’t withdraw his wrist, just left it leaned on the arm of the throne, laces open and gold cuff in full view. As if it didn’t mean anything. As if the weight of it didn’t make his stomach turn.

Horns were blown the length of the ranks, and refreshments were brought. All that had to happen now was for Laurent to endure the rest of the welcoming ceremony, and at the end, sign their treaty.

A series of display fights were performed, marking the occasion with disciplined choreography. Laurent watched with polite attention, cataloguing the series of movements, memorizing the Akielon fighting techniques.

Laurent could see Vannes, who had arrived only yesterday, taking refreshments. Across from her, one of the Akielon generals watched them with an impassive face. Laurent recognized him as Makedon, the man whose army had slaughtered Breteau. He had broken orders from his kyros to seek revenge, risking treason. Bloodthirsty—the epitome of everything Laurent had learned to believe about Akielons. He would provide, perhaps, the greatest challenge to this treaty—Laurent could see in the dull fire behind that impassive gaze that he had not swallowed the alliance, not yet.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by Damen, who said, “Are you going to tell me what won Vannes to your side?”

He turned his eyes back to Vannes—she was smiling at the attendant who served her, a young woman who flushed at the wolfish grin.

Laurent said, “It’s no secret. She is to be the first member of my Council.”

“And Guion?”

“I threatened his sons. He took it seriously. I had already killed one of them.”

Makedon was approaching the thrones.

There was an air of expectancy as Makedon came forward, the men in the tent shifting to see what he would do. His hatred of Veretians was well known—was evident in the slaughter at Breteau. Even if Laurent had forestalled open rebellion, he doubted that Makedon would accept the leadership of a Veretian prince. Makedon bowed to Damen, then stood without showing any respect to Laurent. He looked briefly at the Akielon choreographed fights, then his eyes traveled over Laurent, slowly and arrogantly.

“If this is truly an alliance between equals,” said Makedon, “it’s a pity we can’t see a display of Veretian fighting.”

Laurent’s skin prickled. He knew men like this, men who saw the world only as something to grip in one fist, who understood power as something physical that must be splayed out across bodies.

“Or a contest,” Makedon said. “Veretian against Akielon.”

“Are you proposing to challenge Lady Vannes to a duel?” said Laurent.

He caught Makedon’s gaze, and held it. He knew exactly what the man saw: a youth, less than half his age; a princeling who shirked battle; a courtier with lazy, indoor elegance. Akielons seemed to assume that if you were not built like a pile of stones thrown together you must be inept with a blade.

“Our King has a reputation on the field,” said Makedon, his eyes passing over Laurent slowly. “Why not a demonstration fight between you both?”

“But we are like brothers.” Laurent smiled. He skimmed his fingertips across Damen’s; their fingers slid into one another. The touch sent fire spinning down every nerve of his body, but he held it all the same.

Heralds brought the document, ink on paper, written in two languages, side by side so that neither one was atop the other. It was simply worded. It did not contain endless clauses and subclauses. It was a brief declaration: Vere and Akielos, united against their usurpers, allied in friendship and common cause.

Damen signed it. Laurent signed it. _Laurent R_ and _Damen V,_ the lines of the V sharp and crisp.

“To our wondrous union,” said Laurent.

And then it was done, and Laurent was rising, and the Veretians were departing, a blue stream of banners riding out in a long, receding procession across the field. The Akielon tent was left behind, the red like a spot of blood on the rolling landscape.

***

Laurent sent away the attendants, that night. He unlaced the jacket himself, ripping at the laces, feeling the drag against his sweat-dampened skin. The cuff was heavy on his wrist, a consistent, constricting pressure. He felt uneven, unbalanced—one hand free and the other shackled.

He pressed his eyes closed for a moment, feeling the ache of it. He had wanted—he was not sure what he had wanted, when he had spoken those words. _You should give me the other._

How might it have happened? Alone, just the two of them, the gift exchanged with a murmur of words and the warm heat of hands. What would he have done with it? Kept it, like Nicaise’s earring, another jeweled ghost of a past that would never bloom to future? If they had parted ways, as they intended, at Ravenel, would he have carried it with him? Would he have kept it, even when news reached him that King Damianos had retaken the Akielon throne? Now, Laurent would never know.

Had Damen imagined it like this? Public, a cold-blooded spectacle? No—Laurent knew him too well for that. If Damen had considered it, it had been tender, surely, softened with that warmth his eyes held when he looked at Laurent, before—

 _Stop._ He pressed a closed fist against his brow. It was ridiculous to think of this. To imagine some different, impossible future that was already dead. Laurent had known, when he left Damen alone at Ravenel, that it was their final goodbye. That the next time they met, it would be as the King of Akielos and the Prince of Vere.

Still, the cuff was a thorn in his side, an inescapable reminder of all that had existed between them, when now there was only cold distance. Distance that Laurent had chosen—had wanted. _It's better this way._

Across the field, a short distance away, Damen, too, would be preparing to sleep. Laurent could picture it so clearly, the way his shoulders relaxed as he peeled away layers of cloth, the way the tension bled out of his body. How his features flickered in the warm light of braziers as darkness fell outside. He knew how Damen slept, body sprawled across bedding, pillows crushed under warm skin. He knew how it felt to lie next to him, to share that warmth.

There would be slaves, following the Akielon army. Real slaves—not that façade of submission that had existed between Laurent and Damen. Damen would be served by a woman, surely, to match his preference—taboo in Vere, but the norm in Akielos. She would undress him, as he had once undressed Laurent. Her skin would be soft, sweet, fingers gentle, like the women at Nesson. Laurent wondered if he would bed her, if she would fall apart under those warm hands, the expert touch, the heated slide of skin, as he had. He felt foolish, nauseatingly naïve, as some vulnerable part of his mind winced in pain from the thought. He imagined his own body, his own touch, washed away by the hands of another—the hands of someone tender, someone beautiful. Someone who would care for Damen better.

He was angry—with himself, with Damen. With his uncle. With the woman he imagined, pliant and submissive in a way Laurent would never be. Would never _want_ to be. The emotion was a knot in his stomach, impossible to unwind, heavy and inescapable as the cuff on his wrist.

It was childish to hold onto this. The gold around his wrist was a necessary symbol for the alliance, nothing more. It bound them together as the treaty bound them together, impersonal and cold. He could swallow it, could swallow the pain of it, as he had forced Damen to swallow the whip. They knew so well how to hurt each other.

When it was all over—when Laurent had defeated his uncle, and he and Damen sat on two thrones, separated by the length of two kingdoms—he would remove the cuff. He would find a blacksmith to bend and break it, to rip the gold apart, cut away like necrotic flesh. He would cast it into the sea, or bury it deep in stifling earth, where he would never again feel its weight on his skin. Let Damen wear the cuff if he wanted. Let him sit with the gold forever, as he bedded other people and fought other wars. Laurent did not want it—refused to want it. He would be a King unbound by any man, unencumbered by any weight. Untethered. Unmoored. Alone.


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: sexual assault + abuse
> 
> this chapter is kind of intense! Nothing graphic but lots of feelings related to assault + abuse, so please be prepared for that before you read.

The difficulty was that they could not ride out straight away.

Thanks to his uncle, Laurent now had experience working with a divided troop. But this was not a small band of mercenaries, this was two powerful forces that were traditional enemies, headed by volatile generals on both sides.

Laurent arrived in the audience chamber at Fortaine for their first official meetings with his adviser Vannes and his Captain Enguerran. He was greeted immediately with the sight of Makedon, arms crossed and mouth pulled down in a frown, eyeing the decorative tapestries and stained glass windows as if he found the ornamentation personally offending. Damen stood a few paces away, shoulders tense and eyes darting between Laurent’s entourage and his own men.

Laurent kept the meeting impersonal and professional. He was exacting, focused, and spoke entirely in Akielon. Vannes and Enguerran had less of the language and Laurent took the lead in discussion, using Akielon words like phalanx as though he had not learned them from Damen only two weeks earlier, and giving the calm overall impression of fluency. The lessons had paid off—although he had anticipated needing to speak only to Nikandros. He had not expected Damen to be in the room when he put his new Akielon vocabulary to use. The presence felt incongruent—the echo of so many lessons sat close together over a fire, warm and intimate as Damen smiled at his Veretian accent, had no place here, in this cold room where they spoke only of war.

When he was alone, he sequestered himself in his tent, away from the burning heat of the mid-summer sun. He studied maps of territory and topography and trade routes. He read texts on previous battles, Akielon maneuvers, wartime procedures. He tried to imagine what Auguste might do, in a situation such as this.

Their camps, they agreed, would be kept separate. Veretians, seeing the plain, utilitarian tents spring up, were scornful. Akielons were barbarians who kept company with bastards and walked around half naked. Laurent knew what his men saw when they gazed across that field: their new allies were boorish and crude, unrefined, animalistic.

The Akielons were scornful too, in a different way. They saw the Veretian tents, with their pennants and silks and multicolored panels, and scoffed at the unnecessary frills. They did not want to fight alongside these new, silky allies. In that respect, Laurent’s absence at Charcy had been a disaster. It was a tactical misstep from which he was still trying to recover—made all the worse for the lack of control he'd had over it.

It did not matter. They would fight together soon enough, and both camps could judge then the worthiness of their allies in battle. But first, they must plot their route south, designing the plan by which they would defeat the Regent.

Laurent buried himself in work, exhausting his mind with strategy. During the day he threw himself into the logistics and planning, the tactical groundwork that would facilitate a campaign. He found, in their meetings, that where he tended to focus on details, Damen could assess a situation and summarize the broader picture with cutting efficiency. Together, they plotted routes and set up supply lines. Laurent had never engaged in wartime preparations before, being only thirteen the last time Veretian armies had marched to battle. More often than he liked, he found himself deferring to Damen, to Makedon and Enguerran, all men with greater experience in large-scale wartime preparations.

But none of these men had fought the Regent. It was only Laurent who could decipher the twisted paths that his uncle’s mind might take, cutting into plans to point out overlooked details and contingent possibilities that the others had not considered. At night he lay, awake and alone, trying desperately to untangle every possible thread of the Regent’s plot, to anticipate every possible move.

In the evenings he sparred, privately, on empty training fields, with a few of his best men—Jord, Rochert, Lazar. His shoulder was still healing, the skin stretched tight under bandages that dampened with sweat. He would have a scar. Laurent pushed through the pain, past the stinging and the ache of muscle. After, he called for Paschal, who raised his brows at the angry wound.

“You would heal faster,” said Paschal, after one particularly brutal evening of sparring, “if you did not insist on agitating the injury.”

Laurent frowned. He did not have time to wait for his body to knit itself back together, and they both knew it. The line of Paschal’s mouth was drawn, the creases at the corners of his eyes tight as he wrapped new bandages around the inflamed skin.

Laurent said, “I hardly think a scratch is excuse enough to cease training.”

Paschal made a disbelieving sound in the back of his throat and shook his head. He was smiling, the slightest upward curve of his lips.

“Just like the other one.” The words were muttered, more to himself than to Laurent.

“What was that?”

Paschal paused, as if realizing what he had said. His eyes flickered up to Laurent’s face, fingers hesitating at the shoulder. Laurent could see the moment that he decided to speak. 

“At Chastillon, when I was treating his back, do you know what he said?” The question was mild, not meant to be answered. Paschal looked down at Laurent’s shoulder, continued wrapping the bandage. “‘It’s not that bad.’” The physician shook his head good-naturedly, some sort of fond bemusement at the memory.

Laurent did not have to ask about whom he was speaking. He went still, heart kicking its way into his throat. He did not want to think about Damen—or Chastillon.

When Paschal had finished, Laurent left the tent wordlessly. _It’s not that bad._ He pressed his fingers to his shoulder, just to feel the ache.

***

Laurent’s experience with a divided troop meant he already knew what to look for: food going astray; weapons destined for one or other faction rerouted; essentials for daily tasks within the camp missing. He had dealt with it all on the ride from Arles to Ravenel.

Makedon, too, was nothing new. Laurent had dealt with men like him his entire life—men who scoffed at him, who looked down their noses and spat at his feet and whispered behind his back. Govart had been practice; Guion, too. Compared to his uncle, none of them were a challenge.

Round one came when Makedon refused to accept the extra rations available to his troops from Fortaine. Akielons didn’t need pampering. If Veretians wished to indulge in all this extra food, they could do so.

Laurent leveled a cool gaze and announced that he would likewise change the provisions among his own troops, so that there would not be a disparity. In fact, everyone from soldiers to captains to kings across both troops would receive the same portion, and that portion would be determined by Makedon. Would Makedon inform them now what that portion was to be?

Round two was a skirmish that broke out in the Akielon encampment: an Akielon with a bleeding nose, a Veretian with a broken arm, and Makeon smiling and saying that it had been no more than a friendly competition. Only a coward feared competition.

He said it to Laurent. Laurent said that from this moment on, any Veretian who struck an Akielon would be executed. He trusted the honor of the Akielons, he said. Only a coward would hit a man who wasn’t allowed to hit back.

It was a game that Laurent knew well how to play. He had learned it—with his uncle, at court. He’d had to learn it. The battles they fought were not physical, had nothing to do with brute strength; they were not the sort of battles that men like Makedon were used to. It was fighting that took place all in the mind, in artful words that created elaborate snares from which your opponent could never escape. Laurent had learned to make men obey orders without force, without sentiment, without even loyalty. He did not need to be liked, or trusted. He only needed to outmaneuver his opponent. The Regent had taught him that.

And indeed, it was only the Akielons who murmured in dissent. Laurent’s men had swallowed the alliance. In fact, the way his men talked about him now was not substantially different to the way they had talked about him before: cold, ice-cold, except now he was cold enough to have fucked his brother’s killer.

“The pledge should be made in the traditional manner,” said Nikandros. “A night feast for the bannermen, and the ceremonial sports, the display fighting, and the okton. We gather at Marlas.” Nikandros stuck another token into the sand tray. Laurent’s entire body went cold.

“A strong location,” Makedon was saying. “The fort itself is all but impregnable. Its walls have never been breached, only surrendered.”

No one looked at him. Even so, he kept his face an impassive mask. He had already known this was likely to happen—Marlas was, strategically, the best location for the pledge to take place. Still, he felt as if his blood had turned to ice water.

“Marlas is a large-scale defensive fort, not dissimilar to Fortaine,” Nikandros said to Laurent, later. “Big enough to house both our men and yours, with substantial interior barracks. You’ll see its potential when we get there.”

“I’ve been there before,” said Laurent.

“Then you’re familiar with the area,” said Nikandros. “That makes it easier.”

“Yes,” said Laurent. _Easier._

He saddled his horse that evening, waving away the servants that attempted to assist him. The straps pulled taught under his fingers, and he mounted in one smooth motion. He rode west, towards the sea, leaving both camps behind him.

It was unwise, riding out alone, with an army of Akielons at his back. Even allied, the tension between the two camps was so thick it was suffocating. Laurent had no doubts that there were plenty of men that would not hesitate to strike if they encountered him alone. Part of him wanted it—wished for it, for some physical enemy that he might cut down. Some tangible way to release the coil of feeling that hissed and spat inside him.

 _Marlas._ They had stayed at the fort, before. It had been Laurent’s first time at the border, after the long southward journey with Auguste and his men. He remembered the sweeping stone walls, the proud crenellations, the beautiful carved friezes that decorated each room. Auguste had been late in meetings, but he still came to Laurent’s room that first night. Laurent had been scared, a trembling boy, war suddenly a too-close reality that he was unprepared to face. Auguste read him a fairystory about a beautiful princess and a rabbit that cut its whole body to pieces for a prince.

“I didn’t like that one,” Laurent had said, petulant. “Read me another story.”

“You need to sleep, little brother.” Auguste had smiled. He’d set the book gently on the small table next to the bed.

“The prince was cruel. And the rabbit was stupid. A rabbit only wants to survive—it didn’t make any sense.”

Auguste had drifted then, to the window, which was open, the stars bright pinpricks of light.

“I think it was noble,” he’d said, thoughtfully. Laurent had scoffed at his older brother, who had such grand and sentimental ideas about sacrifice and love.

A week later, they abandoned the fort and rode for the field, to take the Akielons by surprise with an attack in the open. It was meant to save lives.

Laurent reined in his horse. This close to the sea, the air was different, unfamiliar. It felt as if the whole sky was in motion.

 _Marlas._ Nikandros and Makedon spoke of it as if it were Akielon, had always been Akielon. As if it had not been designed by Veretian men, constructed with Veretian sweat. Laurent wondered what difference six years would make, what rooms he would stay in. He wondered what had happened to that book, left behind when they’d marched to the field. Was it still there, somewhere, tucked away in the unforgiving stone?

***

When he returned, Nikandros was waiting for him. He had brought with him a small retinue of men, who glared at the watching Veretian soldiers, wary and frowning.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Laurent’s voice was dry as sand, a single brow raised in bored curiosity.

“Your Highness,” said Nikandros, “I was sent to fetch the physician Paschal.”

“Paschal?” Laurent frowned.

“Yes. On the orders of the King. There has been an incident.”

“An incident.”

“Yes.”

They regarded each other for a moment. Nikandros’ gaze was steady, his eyes like glass.

Laurent said, “Fetch Paschal.” The attendant at his side hurried off, and returned shortly with the physician. He was sent away to the Akielon camp with half of Nikandros’ retinue and two Veretian guards.

Once they had departed, Laurent turned back to Nikandros. “Well?”

“A group of Makedon’s men thought to make sport with one of yours. They were discovered by the King, who stopped them. Makedon was informed. The men will be executed. That is all.”

“Make sport.”

Nikandros shifted uncomfortably, mouth a hard line. “They…claimed they were practicing for the okton. Spear-throwing.”

Laurent could see, in the tension with which the kyros held himself, that he was embarrassed—the Akielon men had broken orders, had acted dishonorably. More than concern for the wellbeing of Laurent’s man, Nikandros disliked admitting to this poor behavior. Though there was concern—and some deeper layer of discomfort that Laurent could not entirely place. He narrowed his eyes.

“And their target?” If Paschal was needed, there had been some injury—but Laurent was not entirely certain why Damen had called for the Veretian physician, instead of one of his own. There was something else.

“The boy was injured.” After a pause, “Not by the spears.”

 _Boy._ Laurent did not have children in his army, but there were young men—eighteen, nineteen, twenty. His own age. Realization was like cold water, trickling down his spine.

“I see,” Laurent said. “They raped him?”

Nikandros’ silence was all the answer he needed.

Laurent waited, in his tent, for Paschal to return with his patient. When they entered, he dismissed the guards.

The boy was badly bruised, trembling, leaning heavily on the physician. Still, he attempted to bow as he entered the tent, saying breathlessly, “Your Highness—I did not fight back, I swear, I—”

Laurent’s heart twisted painfully. He lifted a hand, stopping the flow of speech. The boy blinked at him with large, glazed eyes.

“What is your name?”

“Renaut.”

“Renaut. Please, sit.” Laurent gestured to a chair opposite his desk. The boy sat, wincing. Paschal met Laurent’s eyes, face grim. It was very clear what the Akielons had done. _Barbarians,_ came the thought, unbidden, disgust spiking through Laurent’s mind.

“You are very brave, Renaut.” Laurent said it gently, quietly, the words soft and genuine. The boy looked away, lip trembling. It was clearly not what he had expected to hear from his Prince. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Renaut swallowed hard, eyes stuck to the ground. His hair was a light shade of brown, like fresh-baked bread, tangled and sweat-dampened. He tilted his head forward so that it fell across his face, partially obscuring his eyes.

“I was on patrol on the Eastern side of camp. Five Akielons approached me. I—I don’t speak Akielon. I could not understand what they were saying. One drew his sword, but I knew—your orders. I didn’t fight back.”

Laurent felt sick. His order had been intended to protect his men, not leave them defenseless. Clearly, he had overestimated Akielon honor.

“They beat me. They—” His voice twisted up in his throat. Laurent allowed the boy a moment to breathe. He had no desire to hear the details of what violence Renaut had been forced to swallow, to choke on.

“What stopped them?” Laurent asked. He knew what Nikandros had told him— _they were discovered by the King._ But he did not understand what Damen would be doing, alone at night, on the outskirts of camp.

“I—I had closed my eyes,” Renaut said, frowning, “They were throwing spears. There was a new voice. I thought they had been joined by another. But the spears stopped, and when I opened my eyes they were speaking to their commander. He approached me—he spoke in Veretian. He untied me. The others were afraid of him." A pause, then, "I was afraid of him.”

 _A commander._ The boy didn’t know who it was that had saved him, which meant Damen had not been wearing any of his identifying symbols, the golden lion pin or the fine red cape. What had he been doing? The curiosity nagged at the back of Laurent’s mind.

“He knelt on the ground and spoke to me.”

“Spoke to you?”

Renaut nodded, brow furrowing slightly. “He asked me—about my family, where I was from. I…I told him about my sister. She was thirteen, this summer. We caught fish, and baked them with lemon. She weaves the nets, with my mother.”

Laurent’s heart ached inside his chest. It was exactly as it had been with Erasmus—that gentleness, that kindness. That maddening, awful _goodness._ The King of Akielos had knelt in the dirt and comforted this boy, whom he had never met, who belonged to an army and a country for which Damen bore no love. It was infuriating. It was unfair.

“Then the general came, and the kyros. There were so many men. They spoke with the commander—I do not know what he told them, but I was taken away, to a tent. That was the end of it.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

“That was the King of Akielos,” Laurent said.

Renaut’s face went white. “What?”

“The man who rescued you. He was no commander—he was their King.”

“Damianos…prince-killer—” the boy’s voice was choked, thick with confusion as he said, “But…he was—kind to me. I thought…” His voice trailed off as he shook his head, wordlessly.

Laurent called the guards to bring Renaut to the physician’s tent, where he might rest overnight. They left with the boy. Laurent turned to Paschal.

After a moment, the physician said, “What will you do?”

“The men are to be executed,” said Laurent. “There is nothing left for me to do. Except speak with Enguerran, to ensure no man below the age of twenty-five is put on patrols at the outskirts of camp.”

Paschal nodded, slowly. “The boy will recover,” he said.

“Physically, at least,” said Laurent. Paschal sighed.

“Physically,” he agreed. There was a pause. Then, quietly, “He’s a good man.”

Laurent stiffened, as one braced for a blow. But Paschal did not speak again, only let the words hang, heavy, in the silence between them. Laurent turned away.

“I know,” he said.

***

There was still one matter left to attend to before they rode for Marlas. Laurent went in the gray, pre-dawn hours, the camp still waking around him, to Guion’s chambers at Fortaine, after ensuring that the Councillor would be preoccupied with some other matter. With him, he brought only Jord.

Outside the rooms, Laurent paused. Jord stopped, too, glancing down at Laurent with carefully blank features. He did not know why Laurent had summoned him, did not know their purpose in these quarters of the fort. But the curiosity was repressed, the features professionally bland.

“You are not to repeat a single word of anything you are about to hear. Thanks to Aimeric, I am aware of your ability to keep secrets. If I ever hear that you have breathed so much as a hint of what you witness here, I will have you executed for treason. Do you understand?”

Jord’s mouth was a hard line. “I understand,” he said.

“Good.”

Loyse looked up when they entered the rooms. She was seated at the window, gazing down at the courtyard. Her blank stare was replaced by surprise, then wariness as she stood and bowed. The scattered servants throughout the chambers bowed, too.

“Your Highness,” Loyse said, “My husband is away on business at the storehouses. If you need to speak to him, you will find him there.”

Laurent said, “I came to speak with you.” His voice was mild, “Jord will chaperone.” He looked pointedly at the servants, the dismissal clear in his tone. Loyse watched her staff leave, anxious, a bright note of fear behind her eyes.

He approached her, leaning one shoulder casually against the stone wall and folding his arms. Loyse was a woman of middle years, the hair at her temples greying. Her face was round, with the sort of soft features that, though blurred with age, had clearly been beautiful in youth. They regarded each other, Loyse wary and Laurent appraising. Jord hovered near the entryway, eyes turned pointedly away.

“Did you know?” said Laurent.

Loyse blinked. “What?”

“My uncle. Did you know?”

She sucked in a sharp breath, features twisted in anguish as she realized what he was asking. Her lip trembled as she said, quietly, “Yes.”

Anger, like a closed fist, a pressure in the pit of his stomach. “Didn’t care that your son was getting fucked, so long as it paid for your pretty gowns and a second manor?”

Loyse looked as if she’d been struck. “I _begged_ him,” she said, “not to. He wouldn’t listen to me. He never—you don’t know what he’s like.” Her eyes filmed with tears, gathering at the corner of her lashes. “Aimeric was my baby. My youngest boy. He used to bring me flowers, from the gardens.” Her voice was far away, half-stuck in a past she would never resurrect.

“You loved him.” Flatly, disbelieving.

“More than _anything_ ,” Loyse said, fiercely. “Aimeric was—he was such a sweet little boy. His brothers were so much older, and his father was always so busy…he never had anyone to play with. I used to paint, and he would sit with me…” Her voice thickened with grief, the tears spilling over onto her cheeks.

“Yet you sent him to my uncle’s rooms, all the same.”

Loyse’s eyes flashed with anger, even as she blinked away tears. “ _I_ never sent him. I did everything I could to—” she broke off, shaking her head. “It killed me. I wanted to die, every time I sent him off to bed.”

Laurent could not eliminate, entirely, the anger. _What good is wanting?_ He thought, _you could have gone with him. You could have stayed in his room, you could have forced my uncle to drag your body out the door. You could have screamed and kicked and clawed. You could have told Aimeric that what was happening was wrong. You could have told someone—anyone._

He said none of it. He saw Loyse for what she was: a woman who had felt trapped by her husband, swallowing a pain so great it nearly broke her, even as she allowed it to break her son. He believed her when she said she’d tried—he only wished she had tried harder.

“Why are you here?” she said.

Laurent thought about what he was going to do, and exactly why he was going to do it.

“I am here,” he said, “to tell you how Aimeric died.”

Loyse looked like she might be sick. “Guion already told me.” Her voice was hardly a whisper.

“Guion doesn’t know,” said Laurent.

Outside the window, the sky was growing lighter with the promise of dawn. In just a few hours, they would ride for Marlas.

“The first time,” Laurent said, “He would have been gentle. He would whisper pretty words, say that Aimeric was so grown up, such a good boy, so brilliant and pretty and charming. He’d make him feel special, give him all the love that he never got from your husband. Aimeric was thirteen, just a child, and he would have liked it, at first. Liked the compliments, and the attention, and all those whispered words that made him feel like he was worth something. He would start to crave it, to rely on it, that heady rush of knowing that someone so important could care so much about you. Or seem to, at least.”

Loyse was silent, staring at him in horror.

“When the touching began, Aimeric would have been confused. He would have felt guilty, without understanding why—like something was happening that was not supposed to be happening, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He wouldn’t understand, entirely, the purpose of it. My uncle would say it was because he loved him. Aimeric would be scared, but he would do it anyway, because he wanted that love.”

There was a question, now, growing behind her eyes. Laurent pressed on, though it felt as if he was being ripped apart, body torn into agonized pieces.

“That first time, he would be gentle, but it wouldn’t matter. Aimeric was a boy, his body not meant for it. There would have been pain, and in that pain there would have been fear. And then guilt, because how could he fear the man who loved him? How could he be so ungrateful, to wish it wasn’t happening, when he was the one who had wanted this attention?”

Loyse was crying again, body shaking with silent sobs. But she didn’t interrupt him.

“And it would have gone on like that. It would become less gentle as Aimeric grew used to it, as he learned to stop crying. Every night that my uncle spent in your son’s rooms, Aimeric would feel that same shame, and guilt, and fear, until it was eating him alive, rotting him from the inside. And at the end of it, every time, my uncle would promise he loved him.”

He could feel Jord’s eyes on him, but did not turn his gaze away from Loyse.

“My uncle promised that love to Aimeric. Told him that one day they would be together, because he knew your son was a tool that he might find useful again. That is how he sees the world—how he sees people. Aimeric would have believed him, even after my uncle abandoned him and returned to the capital. All those years, Aimeric held onto that promise, because if it wasn’t love, what my uncle had done to him—well.”

The question in her eyes was transforming, becoming realization. She looked at Laurent as if seeing him for the first time. The pity in her gaze turned his stomach.

“And then, finally, I rode to do my duty at the border. And Aimeric had a use again. My uncle repeated all those pretty promises, all those beautiful lies about love. Aimeric believed him. He could not stop himself believing him. He obeyed, he committed treason, because my uncle told him to. And then, even when I held him prisoner, when his own father had abandoned him on the battlefield—even then, he could not allow himself to see the truth.”

She had a hand pressed against her mouth, muffling the quiet noises of her grief.

“I forced him to face it,” said Laurent. “I stripped away those lies. It was cruel. I will not pretend otherwise. I made him understand that my uncle did not love him, and never had. I left him with nothing but that pain. He killed himself, rather than live with it. That is how Aimeric died.”

The room was very quiet. He waited for Loyse to scrub the tears from her face, for her breathing to even out. His own breathing was shallow, his heart a frightened rabbit in his chest. Jord was a statue at the door, features twisted in anguish.

“Why are you telling me this?” She asked, after a drawn-out silence. Her voice was rough from crying.

“Because,” said Laurent, “I need you to understand exactly the sort of man my uncle is. I need you to understand exactly what it is he does. And I need you to listen carefully, because I am going to need your help to stop him.”


	7. Chapter Seven

The first military coalition of Vere and Akielos launched from Fortaine in the morning, after the execution of Makedon’s men. There were very few problems, the public killings having been good for the soldier’s morale.

They hadn’t been good for Makedon’s morale. Laurent watched the general swing himself into the saddle, then tug hard on a rein. Makedon’s men were a line of red cloaks stretching across fully half the length of the column. His loyalty, as it stood now, was stretched thin—a thread that, if snapped, would sever almost half of their forces.

The horns sounded. The banners went up. The heralds took up their position. The Akielon herald was to the right, the Veretian herald to the left, their banners carefully matched to be the same height. The Veretian herald, Hendric, had a sharp nose and arms swollen with muscle, because banners were heavy.

Laurent and Damen were to ride alongside one another. Neither one of them had the better horse. Neither one of them had the more expensive armor. Damen was taller, but nothing could be done about that, Hendric had said with an impenetrable expression. His eyes twinkled as he said it—Damen furrowed his brow, as if unsure whether the man was joking.

Damen brought his horse alongside Laurent’s at the head of the column. It was a symbol of their unity, the Prince and the King riding side by side, as friends. Laurent kept his eyes on the road, though he felt the presence next to him like the presence of a flame, changing the quality of the air between them.

“At Marlas, we’ll stay in adjacent chambers,” said Damen. “It’s protocol.”

“Of course,” said Laurent. He did not look at Damen as he said it.

Laurent’s features were arranged in a mask of placid calm; he showed no sign of distress, sat upright in the saddle, ignoring the pain that spiked through his shoulder with every jolt of the horse beneath him. He could feel Damen’s flickering gaze, like embers, could see the eyes that darted away in his periphery vision. Laurent ignored him. He spoke charmingly to the generals and even made pleasant conversation in response to Nikandros, when Nikandros spoke to him.

“I hope the injured boy was returned to you safely.”

“Thank you, he returned with Paschal,” said Laurent.

He did not want to think about Renaut, bandaged and bruised, gritting his teeth and wincing with every shift of the horse.

Marlas was a day-long ride, and they set a good pace. The air was loud with sound, a line of soldiers, outriders ahead, servants and slaves behind. When the column passed near, the birds took off, a herd of goats fled over the side of the hill.

It was afternoon when they reached the small checkpoint manned by Nikandros’ soldiers and overseen by an Akielon signal tower. They rode through.

The landscape on the other side looked no different; rich grass fields, green from a spring of generous rain, bruised at the edges from their passing. In the next moment, the horns rang out, triumphant and lonely at the same time, the pure sound absorbed by the sky and the wide open landscape around them.

“Welcome home,” Nikandros said. He said it to Damen.

The last time Laurent had ridden through this field, it had been Vere. Now, it was Akielos. It was the same earth, the same grass and sky. Yet it felt irrevocably changed, scarred and heavy with memory.

They rode through the first of the villages. This close to the border, larger farms had rudimentary outer walls of stone, and some were like improvised forts, with lookouts or well-tried defense systems. The passing of the army wouldn’t be a surprise—not for these people, who had lived in the shadow of war for so many years.

It was impossible to forget that Delpha had become an Akielon province only six years ago, and that before that, for the span of their entire lives, these men and women had been citizens of Vere.

The silent faces gathered, women and men, children, in doorways, under awnings, standing together as the army passed. _My people,_ thought Laurent, except they were not. Not anymore. Not yet.

Tense, afraid, they had come out of their homes to watch the first Veretian banners flying here in six years. One of them had fashioned a crude starburst, with sticks. A child held it up, like the image she saw.

Laurent’s breath twisted painfully in his throat, knotting in his chest. But he said nothing, riding straight-backed at the head of the column. He did not acknowledge his people, with their Veretian language, customs and allegiances, making their small living on the border. He was riding with an army of Akielons who wholly controlled this province. He kept his gaze ahead, the promise burning inside him: _Delfeur will return to Vere. At the end of this all, I will set things right._

***

He remembered how they had looked, at the burial ceremony. The bodies carried over miles of earth, shrouded in a wagon, to be entombed at Arles with every other dead Veretian king. With Laurent’s mother, who had already been put to rest in cold stone. Auguste and his father, both turned to so much rotting meat, washed of blood and gore and draped in white cloth. Jewels glittering on their ornamented tombs.

Marlas was nothing but another decorated grave, a tumble of grass and wildflowers in the blowy, sweet summer weather, shifting back and forth in the gentle air. Here and there an insect droned, a drowsy sound. There were no screams of dying men. There were no gouges like wounds in the soil, no blood painting the ground. A dragonfly dipped and darted. Their horses waded, fording long grass. They joined the wide road, sunlight dappling their path.

It felt wrong—all wrong. As if Laurent’s own body, too, had become a tomb, polished and stoic as stone, concealing all the memory rotting within. No one looked at him. No one remarked on it. No one said, _It was here._ It got worse as they got closer, as though the only evidence of the slaughter was the feeling in his chest.

And then the fort itself came into view.

Marlas had always been beautiful. It was a Veretian fort in the grand style, with high-flung battlements and crenelles, its elegant arches presiding over green fields.

It still looked like that, from a distance. It was an outline of Veretian architecture, promising an interior of high open galleries, banded in carving, filigree gilt and decorative tile. Laurent remembered when those walls had been draped in blue, when the gold starburst flapped against the stone.

Now, Akielons thronged near the gates, men and women straining for a glimpse of their returned King. Akielon soldiers filled the inner courtyard, and Akielon banners hung from every vantage, gold lions on red.

The breath left his lungs as Laurent looked at the courtyard. The parapets were broken down and reshaped. The stonework hacked off. The stone itself carted off for some obscure purpose, the splendid rooftops and towers leveled into an Akielon style. All around him, he saw the empty floor with its tiles pulled up, the ruined ceiling, the bare, painfully stripped stone.

Laurent knew what Akielons thought of Veretian ornamentation: wasteful, ostentatious, unnecessary. But it had always been one of the things he loved, privately, about his country—the search for beauty, the careful crafting, the attention to detail. Vere was a land of artists, of poets, of architects.

He stared at the wall that had once contained a frieze, exquisitely carved, portraying an old Veretian legend about the goddesses of the sun and moon. The artists had spent hours crafting minute details, the elegant curve of a wrist or the beaming ray of light, bringing the story to life meticulously in the once-smooth marble. When he was thirteen, Laurent had stood breathless beneath it, delighting in the story brought to life before his eyes. It had contained love, and history, and life.

Now the wall was bare, the frieze chipped away. Every beautiful thing that had once existed at Marlas had been torn apart by Akielon hands. As if the slaughter on the battlefield was not enough—they had desecrated even this, the place where Laurent had spent his final days with his family. It was like walking into a defiled tomb, and pretending that everything was fine.

Laurent swung down from his horse, thanking Nikandros for the welcome. He walked past the rows of Akielon soldiers in flawless formation.

Indoors, the fort’s household gathered, excited and proud, to meet and serve their King. Laurent felt the echo of another time, another household—the servants Veretian, craning their heads for a glimpse of Auguste. He felt his brother’s ghost on him like a clinging film, like walking through cobwebs. Damen and Laurent were jointly presented to those household officials who would serve them during their time here. They moved from the first set of rooms to the second, rounding the corner and coming into the viewing hall.

Lining the hall were two dozen slaves.

They were arrayed in two rows, prostrated, their foreheads to the floor. All were male, ranging in age from perhaps nineteen to twenty-five, with different looks and different coloring, their eyes and lips accentuated by paint. Beside them, the Keeper of Slaves stood waiting.

Laurent had known to expect it. Akielos was a slave country, after all. He understood their customs, understood the required etiquette. Still, his heart sank in his chest, gut twisting with nausea. It felt like a violation of the most basic kind that Akielos would not only rip Delfeur from Vere’s hands, but sully the land further by poisoning it with this barbaric practice—like spitting on a grave. He wondered, vaguely, how many of the men before him now had once been Veretian children, stolen from their parents’ hands as the spoils of war.

Nikandros frowned. “The King has already made his preference for no slaves known.”

Laurent’s breath stuttered in his lungs. _What?_

“These slaves are provided for the use of our King’s guest, the Prince of Vere.” Kolnas, the Keeper of Slaves, bowed respectfully.

 _Damen was refusing slaves._ The realization sent a tangle of feelings spilling through Laurent, a dizzy spin of emotion. He shoved it back, clinging only to the hot thread of anger. Damen, who had argued in defense of slavery in Arles, who returned now to his own country as King—Damen could spurn his own culture’s practices. He could do anything, without regard for how his men might perceive him. After all, no one could look at the proud face, the rolling muscle and powerful bearing, and think anything but _King._

Not Laurent. Laurent was a stranger in what had once been his own land, now stripped bare and carved into something hard and unfamiliar. He must follow the foreign etiquette that had been brought to Veretian soil, must win the respect of these barbarians that stole the very will from men. He repressed his distaste, strolling forward.

“I like that one,” said Laurent.

The slaves were dressed in light gauzy silks that threaded through the link on their collar and covered very little. Laurent was indicating to the third slave to the left, a dark, bowed head.

“An excellent choice,” said Kolnas. “Isander, step forward.”

Isander was olive-skinned and lithe as a fawn, with dark hair and eyes: Akielon coloring. Not some Veretian child, stolen from the border—his own country had done this to him. He was younger than Damen, nineteen or twenty. Still, there was a superficial resemblance in the curls, brown as burnt wood, and the tanned skin. The anger buzzed, a low note in the back of Laurent’s mind. He could feel Damen’s eyes on him, watching. The gold cuffs on his fine wrists matched the cuff on Damen’s arm—and Laurent’s.

Isander was flushing deeply, though whether from nerves or embarrassment Laurent could not tell. Shyness radiating from him, he rose, and then went to his knees a body length in front of the others, offering himself with all the sweet grace of a palace slave, unobtrusive and without presumption.

“We will have him prepared and brought to you this evening for his First Night,” Kolnas said.

“First Night?” said Laurent.

“Slaves are trained in the arts of pleasure, but they do not lie with another until their First Night,” Kolnas said. “Here we use the same strict, classical training that is used in the royal palace. Skills are learned through instruction, and practices with indirect methods. The slave remains wholly untouched, kept pure for the first use of the Exalted.”

Laurent felt that he might be sick. _Like children,_ he thought, numbly, looking at the men bowed before him, _with no choice in the matter._ He lifted his eyes to Damen’s. _This is what your country does._

“I never did learn how to command a bed slave,” said Laurent. “Teach me.”

“They cannot speak Veretian, Your Highness,” Kolnas explained. “In the Akielon language, using the plain form of address is appropriate. To command any act of service is to honor a slave. The more personal the service, the greater the honor.”

“Really? Come here,” said Laurent.

Isander rose for the second time, a faint tremor in his body as he came as close has he dared before dropping to the ground again, his cheeks bright red. He looked a little dazed by the attention. Laurent extended the tip of his boot.

“Kiss it,” he said. His eyes were on Damen.

Damen’s face was a mask of stone, stripped bare of life like the walls of the fort. But Laurent knew well enough to see the discomfort in the tense line of his shoulders, in the bob of Adam’s apple behind the thin skin of his throat as he swallowed. Isander kissed the toe tip, then the ankle. Then, without instruction, Isander leaned in and rubbed his cheek against the leather of the boot at Laurent’s calf, like a dog nuzzling its master. There was an indecipherable mix of emotion behind Damen’s eyes, as tangled as the feelings that turned Laurent’s own stomach.

“Good boy,” said Laurent, reaching down to pet Isander’s dark curls, while Isander’s eyes closed and he flushed over.

Kolnas preened, pleased that his selection was appreciated. Laurent could see that the fort’s household around them was also pleased, having gone to great lengths to make him feel welcome. They had considered with intense thoughtfulness Veretian culture and Veretian practices. All the slaves were highly attractive, and all were male, so that the Prince might use them in bed without offending Veretian custom.

They had failed to consider the Veretian custom of allowing men to develop independent thought, so that their choices might be their own to make. But Laurent could hardly point this out without offending the entire company—so he swallowed it, all the nausea that curled through him when he looked down at Isander’s wet, blinking eyes. If he had to play this unwinnable game—to uphold the façade of master and pet, owner and slave—then at least he could make sure that Damen lost, too.

“Can he also serve me in the baths?” said Laurent.

“And at the feast for the bannermen this evening when they give their pledge, it that pleases you, Your Highness,” said Kolnas.

“It pleases me,” said Laurent.

***

Laurent was rooming in a suite adjoined to Damen’s, separated from him by a single wall. Damen was in the King’s chambers, which any lord who built a fort installed, in the hope the King would stop there. But even the former lord of Marlas’ optimism had not stretched to the idea that the heads of two royal families would visit simultaneously. To preserve their arrangements of scrupulous equality, Laurent was in the Queen’s chambers, beyond the wall.

He left almost as soon as he arrived, politely weathering the household official’s tour. He sent away the servants, allowing Isander to guide him to the baths. He wished, desperately, that he could send Isander away, too—that he could sink alone into the water, until the heat washed away all the grime of memory that itched on his skin. He could not.

Isander struggled, silently, with the laces. He flushed as he tugged clumsily at Laurent’s sleeves, worrying his lip between his teeth. Laurent could see that the man was afraid his incompetence would displease the Veretian prince—Laurent bit back his impatience, so as not to upset the slave. It was not Isander’s fault that he did not understand Veretian clothing.

After a few minutes of fumbling, Laurent guided Isander’s hand, gently, showing him where to unhook the lacings on the back of the neck of his riding leathers before drawing them through their eyelets. Isander’s fingers trembled under his. Laurent sighed.

“Where are you from?” Laurent said, as the water rolled over his skin, trailing heat in its wake. Isander flushed.

“Exalted?”

“Where were you born,” said Laurent.

Isander blinked up at him, dumbly, as if unsure what to do with the question. Finally, he cast his eyes to the ground.

“Kesus.” His voice was quiet, his face flushed. His hands were feather-light against Laurent, the touch hardly there—still, it made Laurent’s skin crawl.

“How old were you,” said Laurent, “when you came into Kolnas’ employ?”

Isander looked startled, but he answered, dutifully. “I was sixteen, Exalted.”

Laurent released a breath. _How did this happen,_ he wanted to ask, _did you choose it?_ Except he knew, already, there was no choice at all—not in the collar around Isander’s neck, or the cuffs on his wrist.

He turned his mind to political matters. He and Damen would now meet the smaller norther provincial leaders in the hall, where there would be wine and feasting and Nikandros’ bannermen would come, one by one, to make their pledge, swelling the ranks of their army.

When he had finished bathing, Laurent laced himself into his clothing, sending Isander away with a request to fetch a different pair of boots from his rooms. The slave returned, panting and bright-eyed, as Laurent was tying the final knot.

“Thank you,” said Laurent, the words falling incongruently into the space between them.

“This slave is beneath your attention,” said Isander.

***

Men and women reclined on couches, amid scattered low tables or on low, cushioned benches. Everything was near to the ground, in Akielos. Everyone whom rank or office entitled to be here was assembled, and with every northerner of standing gathered to give their pledge, the hall was packed full.

The Veretians present were mostly vertical, standing awkwardly in small groups, one or two perched gingerly on the edge of a seat.

And all through the hall, there were slaves.

Slaves in hip cloths carried delicacies on small platters. Slaves fanned reclined Akielon guests with woven palm leaves. A male slave filled a shallow wine cup for an Akielon nobleman. A slave held out a finger bowl of rose water, and an Akielon woman dipped her fingers in it without even glancing at the slave. Laurent heard the plucked strings of a kithara, and watched the measured steps of slave’s dance, careful and discreet.

Laurent showed no distaste, no discomfort. He reclined on a couch, cultivating an elegant sprawl, as if he was entirely at home surrounded by Akielons. He draped one arm over the back of the couch, leg drawn up, fingers dangling. Silk rucked around his knee.

Isander curled himself at Laurent’s side, kneeling on the floor. He wore a brief garment like a Vaskian man’s cloth. His collar fit him like a second skin. Laurent kept his expression polite, slightly aloof, as if the presence of the man next to him was as natural as breathing. As if Isander’s hopeful, childishly adoring gaze did not prick like a thorn against skin.

When Damen entered, the hall fell silent.

There was no trumpet flourish or herald’s announcement, as there would have been in Vere. He just walked in, and everyone went to the floor. Guests rose from their couches, then dropped, foreheads to the stone. Slaves went to their stomachs. In Akielos, Laurent had learned, kings did not elevate their status. It was up to those around to lower themselves.

Laurent was the only person who did not rise. He didn’t need to. He watched as Damen strolled forward through the silence, footsteps sharp against the stone. Their twin couches were next to each other.

“Brother,” Laurent said, pleasantly.

The eyes of everyone in the hall were on them. He felt their gazes, their underfed curiosity. There was a low string of murmuring— _it really is him, Damianos, alive and here—_ accompanied by the brazen looks, studying their King, catching at the gold cuff on his wrist, turning to Laurent in his Veretian clothes like an exotic ornament— _so that is the Veretian Prince._ And beneath that the speculation that was never spoken aloud.

Laurent was scrupulously correct in the face of it, his behavior immaculate, even his use of the slave was an act of unimpeachable etiquette. In Akielos it pleased the host for a guest to make use of his hospitality. And it pleased the Akielon people for their royal family to take slaves, a sign of virility and power, and a cause of great pride.

Damen sat, sinking onto the couch beside Laurent’s. He looked out over the sweep of the hall, the sea of bowed heads. He gestured, indicating that the hall should rise from their prostrations. Bodies unfolded as if by magic, responding immediately to his will. Power rippled around him, like a cloak.

“Bannermen of Delpha. By now, you have seen the evidence that Kastor killed the King, our father. You know of his alliance with the usurper, the Regent of Vere. Even now, the Regent has troops stationed in Ios, ready to take Akielos. Tonight, we call for your pledge to fight them alongside us, and alongside our ally, Laurent of Vere.”

There was an uneasy pause. Laurent felt the eyes of the bannermen, heavy and guarded, studying him. He looked back with lazy elegance, unperturbed. Damen was asking them to accept him at first sight, less than a generation out from the war. Tension was a buzzing current in the air.

One of the bannermen stepped forward, a man in his forties with dark hair and a close-cut beard. His jaw was set in a hard line. “I want assurances that Vere does not hold undue influence over Akielos.”

Damen’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Speak plainly.”

“They say the Prince of Vere is your lover.”

Silence. The man was bold—Laurent could appreciate that. He voiced the concerns that many of these warlords must hold, a clear example of their volatility, their hatred of Vere. It was a challenge to Damen, new in his position, his authority still uncemented—and Damen knew it. His voice hardened with cold authority.

“Who we take to our bed is not your concern.”

“If our King takes Vere to his bed, it is our concern,” said the man.

“Shall I tell them what really happened between us? They want to know,” Laurent said. His voice was airy, unconcerned, as if humoring a childish whim.

He began to unlace the cuff of his sleeve, drawing the ties through the eyelets, then opening the fabric to expose the fine underside of his wrist—and then the unmistakable gold of the slave cuff.

Laurent felt the shocked buzz go around the hall, felt its prurient undercurrent. Hearing that the Prince of Vere wore and Akielon slave cuff was different to seeing it. The scandal was immense, the gold cuff a symbol of the ownership of the Akielon royal family. It was why Damen had given it to him.

Laurent leaned his wrist elegantly on the curved arm of the couch, the open sleeve reminiscent of a delicate open shirt collar, its laces trailing.

“Do I have the question clear?” said Laurent, speaking in Akielon. “You are asking if I lay with the man who killed my own brother?”

He wore the slave cuff with utter disregard, as if he could not even feel its weight against his skin. He had no owner, the aristocratic posture said that. Laurent did not possess Damen’s commanding presence, did not have the air of inviolable power. Still, he had made himself untouchable. He cultivated a faultless grace on the reclining couch, holding himself aloof, as if he were entirely above these proceedings. As if the idea that anyone could touch him was ridiculous.

The bannerman said, “A man would have to be ice-cold to sleep with his brother’s killer.”

“Then you have your answer,” said Laurent.

There was a silence, in which Laurent held the man’s gaze, unflinching.

“Yes, Exalted.”

He bowed his head, and unconsciously used the Akielon _Exalted_ rather than the Veretian titles _Highness_ or _Majesty_.

“Well, Barieus?” said Damen.

The man—Barieus—knelt two steps before the dais. “I will pledge. I see that the Prince of Vere stands with you. It’s right that we swear to you here, on the site of your greatest victory.”

 _The site of your greatest victory._ Of course. For prince-killer Damianos, Auguste’s death was the greatest achievement.

Laurent weathered the pledges, watched as each man knelt and pledged himself to Damen, who performed his thanks in return at the end of it. The food came, signaling the end of the oaths and the commencement of the feast, the joyous celebration.

Slaves brought the food. Laurent watched, curious, as squires served Damen. It was an awkward arrangement that displeased everyone in the hall. Damen realized this, his own body stiff with tension—yet he refused the slaves.

Isander served Laurent. Like a child, eager to please, he strove continuously to do well. He selected each delicacy for Laurent to sample, bringing him only the best in small, shallow dishes, refreshing the water bowl for Laurent to clean his fingers. He did it all with perfect form, discreetly attentive, and never drawing attention to himself.

It made Laurent sick. The boyish desire to please was too familiar—he remembered a time when his own eyes had held that same brand of dangerous adoration. As if to debase yourself for another was anything but humiliating.

Two slaves were taking up position in the center of the hall, one with a kithara, the other standing beside him, an older slave, chosen for his skill in recitation.

Laurent heard himself say, “Play _The Fall of Inachtos,_ ” and a murmur of approval passed over the hall. Kolnas, the Keeper of Slaves, congratulated Laurent on his knowledge of Akielon epics. “It’s one of your favorites, isn’t it?” said Laurent, transferring his gaze to Damen.

It was—he did not need to ask to know. He remembered the conversation—speaking, as they so often did, over warm firelight. They had somehow moved from strategic maneuvers to childhood stories; all of Damen’s had to do, unsurprisingly, with the glory of battle, depictions of heroic Akielons cutting down their enemies. They listened now as Nisos rode out to kill Inachtos, and take his walled city.

_Cut off from his brothers_

_Inachtos strikes too short at Nisos_

_Where a thousand swords_

_Have failed, Nisos raises one_

The stirring notes of the battle song drew a burst of great approval from the bannermen, and their appreciation of Laurent grew with every stanza. Laurent smiled indulgently, each word of the ballad aching like pressure on an unhealed bruise.

Laurent turned away the wine that was brought in shallow cups. He did not look at Damen, though his presence felt impossible to ignore. Laurent wondered, idly, if there had been ballads written about Damianos, prince-killer. _Where a thousand swords have failed…_

Across the room, he watched Vannes accepting a morsel of food from a slave. She was engaged in conversation with an Akielon noblewoman, a predatory gleam in her eye as she leaned close to murmur something. The woman blushed.

On another reclining couch, Guion sat with his wife, Loyse. Guion was conversing in Akielon with one of the bannermen. Loyse watched politely, following as best she could.

None of them seemed perturbed by their surroundings. If they felt any discomfort with the stripped walls, with the darting Akielon eyes, with the inescapable presence of the slaves, then they did not show it. The room felt too close, too loud. Laurent pressed his eyes shut for a moment, briefly.

When he opened them, Jord was approaching Loyse. He stopped, speaking only a few words to her. Next to Laurent, Nikandros was conversing with Makedon and Barieus—their voices overshadowed anything Jord was saying. Laurent watched as Damen lifted his hand, summoning the Veretian soldier to his side.

He turned back to the conversation with Nikandros, sliding smoothly into the chatter with a subtle interjection. They were discussing the okton. At Laurent’s request, Nikandros explained the sport to him. It sounded incredibly dangerous, with little purpose. It was exactly the sort of thing Auguste would have loved. Once, as a child—before Laurent was born—Auguste had been challenged by a friend to climb a towering tree, just to see how far he could get. He had fallen from a high branch, breaking his arm and three fingers on his left hand when he landed badly on his side. His pinky had healed crooked. Laurent used to make fun of him for it.

Laughter grew louder, as it came in bursts across the hall. Isander brought Laurent a sprig of grapes in a small dish. He felt the eyes of the Akielon bannermen on him as he murmured his approval, gesturing for Isander to join him on the reclining couch. Isander glowed, smiling up at him shyly. He picked a single grape from the sprig, and lifted it to Laurent’s lips.

Laurent leaned in. He twined a finger around a curl of Isander’s hair and allowed himself to be fed, grape by grape, a prince with a new favorite. In the periphery of his vision, he saw one of the generals tap the shoulder of the slave serving him, a signal that he wished to discreetly retire, and enjoy the slave’s attentions in private.

The general was not the only Akielon departing with a slave; men and women throughout the hall were availing themselves. The wine, and the slaves enacting the battle were breaking down inhibitions. Akielon voices grew loud, emboldened by drink.

Laurent leaned in further to murmur gentle praises intimately into Isander’s ear. _Just a bit more—_ he had to ensure that the act was convincing. It would be in poor taste to leave the banquet early, spurning his host’s hospitality. But if he were to leave the banquet with his slave, with whom he was clearly enamored…

As the recitation reached its climax, the clash of swords sending tension through every muscle of his body, Laurent could no longer bear it. He tapped Isander’s shoulder, and rose. Seeing him with the slave, men and women fell away, allowing Laurent to pick his way quickly and neatly through the crowd. Isander followed, eyes downcast, demure.

They had just reached the doorway when Damen rose. The court surged towards their King, everyone eager for a moment of his time and attention. Laurent’s stomach churned with nausea, he slipped through the door and into the corridor beyond.

Once they were away from the eyes of the court, Laurent increased his pace, turning the first corner into a passage. Isander hurried to keep up, his face shy and expectant. Laurent stopped. They stood beneath a stark, empty arch with all its Veretian lattice stripped away.

“Direct me to the stables,” said Laurent.

Confusion broke over the slave’s face, lips parting slightly, eyes wet and blinking.

“The—the stables are that way, Exalted, through the Eastern courtyard. If it pleases you, I can guide you—”

“No,” Laurent cut him off. “Your presence will not be necessary.” Isander flushed, embarrassed, eyes wounded for a moment before he cast them downwards to gaze unobtrusively at the floor. Laurent felt a distant pang of guilt over the sudden rejection, his sharp frigidity a marked change from the falsified warmth he had showed towards Isander during the banquet. Yet he had no energy left for the façade.

He felt only the wordless desire to escape, to take himself as far as possible from that feast, that celebration, those grinning, hungry Akielons and blushing, bashful slaves.

He abandoned Isander, and made his way to the stables alone.

***

_Do not worry, little brother._

The fall of the tent flap, heavy canvas blotting out the sunlight.

_I could never leave you._

Auguste—Auguste, don’t go—

The memory pressed hard against Laurent as he drove his heels into the horse, galloping into the night. He rode across the field, past the crumbling stone ruins, trampling the soft grass. The sweet scent of crushed wildflowers permeated the air.

He should have gone after him. He should have gone with him, should have ridden to the front lines of that battle. He should not have stayed in that tent, waiting—should not have allowed his brother to slip through his fingers.

Laurent rode desperately, as if he was still trying to escape that tent, that decision—as if, if he only tried hard enough, he might finally catch that specter of his brother, smiling, silhouetted by sunlight.

He had never been to the front lines at Marlas. Though he had fought, his father had kept him surrounded by Veretian troops, away from the thick of battle. Still, he had seen bloodshed—still, he had shed blood. He had been superficially injured, withdrawn from the fight, patched up and sat in the tent to await his brother’s return.

It was because of this that Laurent did not know the exact spot where it had happened; he could only approximate. He rode past the stone blocks that were half part of the earth—the remnants of a long-dead empire that predated Marlas. In the dark, it was quiet, yet in Laurent’s mind he could see the soldiers, the flashing armor, the bloodied swords. He could smell the air thick with dying breaths.

He stopped at the cracked stone column of an overgrown pillar and dismounted, wrapping his horse’s reins around the fixture. Clearing a final jut of ruined masonry, he spotted a stone outcrop, spread flat beneath the stars.

For his tenth birthday, Auguste had taken him riding at Chastillon. That night, they trekked out to the fields, where the moon felt closer to the earth. They climbed the sloping hills and sat in the soft grass. Auguste had unlaced his jacket, then Laurent’s, and they lay together on the silk and painted pictures in the stars.

Now, Laurent stood alone. His throat felt tight as he tugged at the laces of his jacket. He laid the garment on the stone and sat. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine Auguste sitting next to him. Somewhere nearby was the spot where his brother’s blood had spilled into the earth, where the life had fled his body. If there were any pieces of Auguste left—in the air, in the grass, in the stars—then it would be here.

Laurent gazed, silently, at the stars. He tried to remember the pictures Auguste had seen, the ways his eyes had connected those pinpricks of light. It felt important that he remember. But all the shining points blurred together, until none of them looked like anything—try as he might, Laurent would never again see the sky through his brother’s eyes.

There was a sudden noise from behind him—the slide of a stone. Laurent turned. For a moment, he saw only the silhouette: the slope of shoulder, the moonlight a halo behind the dark head. For a moment—just one tiny, fleeting moment—his heart leapt in his chest. _Auguste?_

But it wasn’t Auguste. It was Damen.

Laurent felt his chest hollowing out. “Oh,” he said, “perfect.” 

Damen said, “I thought you might want—”

“Want?” There were so many things that he wanted, and none of them here.

“A friend,” said Damen. He hovered, awkwardly, standing a few paces away. “If you’d prefer me to leave, I will.”

“Why cavil?” said Laurent. “Let’s fuck.”

He said it flatly, without emotion. He had seen the way Damen watched him during the banquet—had felt the hungry weight of those eyes on his lips as Isander fed him.

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“It might not be what you meant, but it’s what you want.” Laurent said, “You want to fuck me.”

It seemed to be all that anyone wanted—to fuck him. Or kill him. Or both. There must be something about his body that begged for destruction. Laurent had accepted that long ago.

“You’ve been thinking about it since Ravenel. Since Nesson.”

Damen breathed slowly, as if to absorb the words was painful. When he spoke, his voice was careful, deliberate. “I came because I thought you might want to talk.”

“Not particularly.”

Damen said, “About your brother.”

“I never fucked my brother,” Laurent heard himself say it, the words sharp and hollow as so much cracked bone. “That is incest.”

 _This is where you killed my brother,_ he thought. _This is where you shoved your sword through his body, past muscle and bone and flesh, until the blood spilled out of him like water._ He could not begin to imagine why Damen had thought he would want to _talk about it._

“You’re right,” said Damen. “I’ve been thinking about it since Ravenel. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”

“Why?” said Laurent. “Was I that good?”

“No. You fucked like a virgin,” said Damen, “half the time. The rest of the time—”

“Like I knew what to do?”

“Like you knew what you were used to.”

The words hit him with physical, bruising force. Laurent felt himself sway, like he’d been dealt a blow.

He said, “I’m not certain I can take your particular brand of honest just at the moment.”

Damen said, “I don’t prefer sophistication in bed, if you were wondering.”

“That’s right,” said Laurent. “You like it simple.”

Now it was Damen’s turn to sway, unsteady. He released all the breath in his body and stood staring at Laurent, an infuriating note of betrayal in his eyes. Laurent’s own breathing was shallow. He held his ground, hoping that corrosive acid that lived in his veins was clear in his gaze.

“He died well,” Damen forced the words out. “He fought better than any man I’ve known. It was a fair fight, and he felt no pain. The end was quick.”

Damen spoke as if he truly believed the words, which only sharpened the anger eating its way through Laurent’s body. As if anyone could _die well._ As if bleeding out in the dirt could be noble, could be painless, could be anything other than death.

“Like gutting a pig?” said Laurent.

Damen opened his mouth to say something, eyes alive with pain. Before he could speak—a rumbling of sound. Laurent jerked around to look into the dark, where the sound was growing louder—hoof beats, thundering closer.

“You sent your men out to look for me too?” said Laurent, his mouth twisting.

“No,” said Damen. And then his hands were on Laurent’s body, pushing him hard out of sight, into the shelter of one of the huge, crumbling blocks of stone.

In the next second, the troop was on them, at least two hundred men, so that the air was thick with the passage of horses. Damen pressed Laurent firmly into the rock, and held him in place with his body. The riders didn’t slow, even on this uncertain ground in the dark, and any man in their path would be trampled, tumbled, kicked from hoof to hoof. Discovery was a real threat, the rock cool against Laurent’s back, the dark shuddering with the pounding of hooves and heavy lethal horseflesh.

Laurent held himself firmly in place, though every muscle in his body screamed for release. He felt Damen’s weight, his breath, his pounding heartbeat—all of it too close, too hot, too excruciatingly _alive._

It took every bit of his will to keep himself from shoving Damen away. Horses plunged all around them like the rushing of a stream. Some small, desperate part of Laurent’s mind wanted to force himself away from the arms that trapped him, to take his chances with the cutting hooves and crushing muscle of the horses.

And then they were gone, passing them as quickly as they had arrived, disappearing across the fields towards a destination in the west. The hoof beats receded. Yet Damen didn’t move, pressing their chests together, so that Laurent was forced to breathe shallowly against his shoulder.

Laurent shoved him away, pushing himself out to stand with his back turned to Damen, breathing hard. His skin crawled with revulsion, with lingering heat.

Laurent did not turn back. He felt that if he looked now at Damen’s face he might break—might shatter, irrevocably, with no hope of ever piecing himself back together. He held himself very still, and concentrated only on pulling air into his lungs.

“I know you’re not cold,” said Damen. “You weren’t cold when you ordered me tied to the post. You weren’t cold when you pushed me down on your bed.”

Laurent couldn’t— _do this_ right now. It was too much.

“We need to leave.” He spoke without looking at Damen. “We don’t know who those riders were, or how they got past our scouts.”

“Laurent—”

He could hear, in Damen’s voice, that he wasn’t going to let it go. Like a dog with a bone, he insisted on _speaking_ about it, on unearthing the grave of their shared past, on examining the rotting, bloated corpse of all the violence between them.

“A fair fight?” Laurent interrupted him, turning back. He wrapped his hands into white-knuckled fists, battling to keep his voice steady. The last thing Auguste had ever seen was the face of the man that stood, now, before Laurent. “No fight’s ever fair. Someone’s always stronger.”

And then the bells from the fort began to ring, the sound of a warning, their sentries belatedly reacting to the presence of unknown riders. Laurent reached down to snag up his jacket, shrugging into it, laces hanging loose. Damen brought over their horses, unhooking the reins from the stone column. Laurent swung up wordlessly into his saddle and put his heels into his horse, both of them riding hard back to Marlas.


	8. Chapter Eight

It might have been nothing, simply an incursion. But privately, Laurent was relieved that Damen decided to follow the riders, though it meant dragging men up to ride out in the dim light of pre-dawn. They streamed out of Marlas and rode west, out through the long fields. But they found nothing, until they came to the first village.

They smelled it first. The thick, acrid smell of smoke, blown in from the south. The outer farms were deserted and blackened with fire, which still smoldered in places. There were large patches of scorched earth that spooked the horses with their startling heat when they passed.

It was worse when they rode into the clustered village itself. Laurent knew, from his own brief experience riding to battle and from his study of war through texts, that an honorable commander might give warning to those innocents in his path, that they might make for the surrounding countryside, taking shelter in the hills with their best cow, or provisions. Or, if no warning was given, the troop’s leader might make his men pay for the provisions they took, and the daughters and sons they enjoyed. But Laurent had no misconceptions about his uncle’s benevolence.

This was not honorable warfare. This was the vibration of hooves at night, families rousing in confusion with no chance to escape, only time to bar the doors. Barricading themselves inside would have been instinctive but not useful. When the soldiers set fire to the houses, they would have had to come out.

Laurent reined in his horse beside Makedon and the Akielon men riding with him. The light of dawn was thin, weak, choked by the remnants of hazy smoke. Next to him, Damen swung down off his steed. The blackened earth crunched like bone under his feet.

There was a grim familiarity on both Veretian and Akielon faces. Breteau had looked like this. And Tarasis. This was not the only unprotected village ruined as a salvo in this fight.

“Send a party to follow the riders. We stop here to bury the dead.”

As Damen spoke, Laurent watched a soldier let a dog loose from the chain it strained at. The hound streaked across the village, stopping at one of the far outbuildings, scrabbling at the door.

Damen frowned at it. The outbuilding was set away from the cluster of homes. It stood intact. Without preamble, he began to move towards it, away from the troop. The dog was whining, a high, tinny sound. As Damen placed his hand on the door of the outbuilding, Laurent swung down from his own horse to follow.

A child pushed herself out of the pile of firewood stacked against the side of the building. Laurent watched, expecting her to flee. Instead, she placed herself behind Damen and said, “There’s nothing there. Don’t go inside.” Her voice was unsteady, her small hands gripped in fists.

Drawing closer, Laurent saw that she looked to be about nine. She was white-faced, trembling, but she held her ground. Laurent could see how it might have happened: her house one of those on the outskirts of the village, her mother or father pushing her out some back window and telling her to hide. The child must have wriggled into the stacked wood and crouched, silent, as she watched her village burn. That she stood now before a company of armed men to defend whatever was inside the outbuilding was an astounding testament to her bravery.

“If there’s nothing there, why not go inside?” Laurent spoke carefully, voice calm and neutral.

“It’s just an outbuilding,” the girl insisted.

“Look.” Laurent dropped to on knee in front of her, and showed her the starburst on his ring. “We are friends.”

She said, “My friends are dead.”

Damen said, “Break it in.”

Laurent held back the girl. It took two impacts of a soldier’s shoulder before the door splintered. Damen transferred his hand from sword hilt to knife hilt, and led the way into the confined space. The dog rushed in after him.

“I’m going to let you go, now.” Laurent said, quietly. The girl was crying, and she scrubbed roughly at the tears once her arms were freed. She trailed behind him as he moved to stand in the doorway.

Inside, there was a man lying on the straw-strewn dirt floor, with the broken end of a spear protruding from his stomach. A woman stood between him and the door, armed with nothing but the other end of the spear. She gripped it with white knuckles as she faced down Damen and the soldiers, jaw set and eyes flashing. Laurent could see, in that moment, that she was prepared to die.

The room smelt of blood. It had soaked into the straw, into the ground, into the air. The man’s eyes moved from Damen to Laurent, still standing in the doorway. His face transformed with shock.

“My Liege,” he said, and with a spear in his stomach, he was trying to push himself up on one arm to rise for his Prince. The words took Laurent like an arrow through the throat.

He heard himself say, “Call for Paschal.” He stepped into the crude space, moving past the woman, simply putting his hand on the spear shaft she held and drawing it out of the way. Then he dropped to his knees on the dirt floor, where the man had collapsed back onto the straw. He was gazing up at Laurent, recognition a light behind his eyes.

“I couldn’t hold them off,” the man said.

“Lie back,” said Laurent. “The physician comes.”

The man’s breath rattled. He was trying to say that he was some old retainer from Marlas. Laurent kept his eyes on the man, looking nowhere else. He had fought for these villagers against young, mounted soldiers. Probably, he had been the only one here with any training, though any training that he’d had would have been from his past; he was old. Still, he had fought. This woman and the child had tried to help him, then to hide him. It didn’t matter. He was going to die from the spear punched through his belly.

“Who did this?” said Damen. Laurent lifted his eyes, and saw that he was kneeling in front of the girl. She said nothing, her small shoulders shaking. But it wasn’t fear in her eyes. It was rage.

Damen said, “I swear to you, I will find them and make them pay.” The words felt hollow in this small, bloodied room, though Laurent could feel the fervor with which Damen said them. What price could ever be paid for this? What cost, for ash-covered bones and broken spears?

The girl met Damen’s eyes, as if thinking these same things. There was that identical resigned anger that Laurent had seen in the woman as she faced down a cadre of soldiers with only a broken spear-shaft. They had both seen death; they knew its face.

“Damianos,” the girl said, as if she had carved the name into her heart. “Damianos did this. He said it was his message to Kastor.”

***

Laurent remained with the man, head spinning, even as Damen pushed himself outside. It was obvious, now, what had happened. Soldiers shouting Damianos’ name had ridden through this village in the dark. They had cut down villagers with swords, burned them in their houses, a planned move meant to injure Damen politically. It was exactly the sort of tactic the Regent would use. Laurent had always known this fight was going to be ugly.

Still, he felt dazed as Paschal arrived and began to study the wound. For a moment, Laurent was unable to locate the source of his surprise—and then it became clear. _Damianos._ For all he had expected his uncle to do something like this, he had not thought the attack would be targeted at Damen. Laurent had assumed it would be his name shouted in the dark, his reputation dragged through blood and ash and dirt. The way it had always been.

To find, suddenly, that the private, twisted game of his uncle’s had suddenly expanded to include a new opponent was disorienting. Laurent had never seen the Regent’s hand turned so blatantly against another. He knew what Damen would be feeling: that directionless anger, the helpless frustration, the sense of injustice that the Regent might sacrifice innocent lives just to poison a man’s name in his citizens’ mouths.

He felt a strange sort of sympathy; it rose like nausea in Laurent’s gut as he realized that Damen was, perhaps, the only person with whom he shared this experience. The only person who might be able to even begin to understand what it meant to face the Regent as an opponent. To feel hunted like a mouse by a snake. It was a unique sense of powerlessness that left nothing but anger and poison in its wake.

Paschal’s hands were red with blood. The woman knelt on the floor beside him, eyes filmed with tears. Laurent reached out to grip the hand of the dying man. “You fought well,” he said, “You do honor to your country.” The words felt sour on his lips, incongruent. Where was the honor in death on a dirt floor, life bleeding into straw?

Yet the old man’s eyes held no fear. Even the pain seemed distant, gaze far away as he made a final, heroic effort to draw air into his lungs. He smiled vaguely, lips turned slightly upwards, and found the woman crouched at Paschal’s side. Softly, he murmured, “Genevot…”

Death was a simple release of breath. They waited, but he lay unmoving, lungs void of air. The woman did not cry, holding back the tears that pooled in her eyes by sheer force of will. She rose and went to the girl, gathering the child into her arms. Laurent released the man’s hand.

He left Paschal and his men behind, with instructions to see that the survivors were brought safely to Marlas. He stepped outside, expecting to see the men working, digging pits for the dead. Indeed, there were the beginnings of half-dug graves—but the men were not working. They were gathered in a crowd at one end of the village. Laurent frowned.

He could see Damen’s footprints moving away from the outbuilding, towards the tree line that marked the outskirts of the village. There was the corpse, face down, of an Akielon soldier. Laurent’s heart beat like a drum in his chest. The corpse wore a notched belt.

From the crowd of men, there came the ringing sound of steel.

Laurent ran, his blood like ice in his veins. _No no no._ In his mind were a thousand curses against his uncle, for the convoluted and twisting paths of his plots, and a thousand curses against Damen, whose anger so often blinded him to anything but straight lines of thought.

Laurent shoved through the crowd of men, who were watching in horror as Damen landed a blow with such strength that it ripped Makedon’s sword out of his hands. Damen raised his blade again, without hesitation, death in steel shearing towards the general's neck.

_“Stop!”_

Laurent’s voice cut across the fight, ringing with unmistakable command. He launched himself into the open space, wrenching Makedon backwards to hit the dirt and taking his place. The steel flashed as it drove towards his neck.

There was a moment in which Laurent was unsure whether Damen would obey. The steel shone silver in the periphery of his vision. Damen’s eyes burned with all the fire of the sun, with such concentrated rage that it left Laurent breathless. _Is this what Auguste saw, before he died?_

The sword stopped a hair’s breadth from Laurent’s neck.

Damen was breathing hard. His eyes focused on Laurent, then swept across the men watching. The steel slid on the fine skin of Laurent’s neck, the barest touch, like a kiss.

“Another inch and you rule two kingdoms,” said Laurent.

“Get out of my way, Laurent.” Damen’s voice was like shattered glass, all broken edges.

“Look around you. This attack is cold-blooded planning, designed to discredit you with your own people. Does Makedon think like that?”

“He killed at Breteau. He wiped out a whole village at Breteau, just like this.”

“That was retaliation for my uncle’s attack on Tarasis.”

“You would defend him?” said Damen.

Laurent said, “Anyone can notch a belt.”

Damen’s grip tightened on the sword, fingers flexing minutely. For a moment, the violence was like a promise between them. Laurent could feel how badly Damen wanted to cut into him.

Instead, he slammed his sword back into its sheath. His eyes raked Makedon, who was breathing unevenly, looking from one to the other of them. They had been speaking quickly, in Veretian. 

Damen said, “He just saved your life.”

“I should give him my thanks?” Makedon said it, sprawled in the dirt.

“No,” said Laurent, in Akielon. “If it were left to me, you’d be dead. Your blunders play into my uncle’s hands. I saved your life because this alliance needs you, and I need this alliance to overthrow my uncle.”

He did not try to stop Damen, when he left. The men parted like water, staring at their King with horrified awe. Laurent watched him go, feeling the ghost of steel against his neck.

***

They would ride to Sicyon.

Two hundred men could not travel for days in open country without anyone noticing. It was not difficult, then, to trace their movements back to a launching point. When they returned from the village, they held the meeting, mapping the route. Damen spoke only a few words, anger like a cloak around his shoulders, eyes hard as stone. Laurent could see the unreleased tension in his body, sharp as a knife.

Once the date was set, Damen swept out of the room without bothering to dismiss his men. Nikandros watched him go, features troubled.

As Laurent stood to leave, he said, “Is it often like this?”

Laurent paused. Then, carefully, “You mean fighting my uncle?” They were alone in the room. The rest of the men had left.

“I—” Nikandros shook his head. “What happened at that village wasn’t a _fight_. If you want to fight a man, you face him, you don’t—”

He fell silent. It was exactly the sort of thing Damen might have said, once.

Laurent said, “You say that you face a man if you want to fight him. My uncle would tell you that there’s no need to bloody your own hands if you can send servants to slaughter a pig.”

Nikandros felt silent. He remained, alone, at the empty table as Laurent left.

***

The indoor training arena at Marlas was a long, wood-paneled room, eerily similar to the training arena at Arles, with packed sawdust floors and a thick wooden post at one end. At night, it was lit by torches that flickered light across walls ringed with benches, and covered over with mounted weaponry: knives sheathed and bare, crossed spears, and swords.

Damen had dismissed the soldiers, the squires and the slaves. Sweat dripped from his skin. He had stripped from the waist up, muscle rippling like water across back and arms as he hefted a blade, battling invisible opponents. His face was flushed, his breathing heavy.

Laurent stood in the doorway, watching him. He moved like something from a dream—or a nightmare. There was an otherworldly quality to the fluid motion of his limbs, as if the gravity that held down other men on Damen was only a strained thread, barely able to tie him to the earth. He fought like it was a prayer, with almost religious fervor, as if behind the physicality of violence he was offering something.

And then he turned, and saw Laurent.

It was the eyes from under the helm at Marlas, flashing, painfully alive. Laurent felt it, close, in the distance between them. _This is the man who killed my brother._

“If you’re this angry,” he said, “you should fight a real opponent.”

“There’s no one—” Damen stopped, but the unspoken words hung, dangerous with the challenge. _There’s no one good enough._ The fury was an unbridled horse under his skin, in his breathing.

“There’s me,” said Laurent.

He did not wait for a response. Damen watched as he drew a sword from the wall, the gaze alive with heat that was more than anger. Laurent met his eyes without giving ground, his own feelings sharpened, ice against fire. The gold cuff on Damen’s wrist caught the torchlight and flickered, so that it looked almost like a living creature. Laurent’s own cuff was an unfamiliar weight as he lifted his weapon.

“You want me to put you on your back in the dirt?” Damen’s voice was thick and heavy.

“You think you can?”

Laurent cast his sword-sheath to the side. It lay disregarded in the sawdust as he calmly stood with an open blade. His heart had gone still in his chest, stuttering with anticipation.

They stood alone, with no witnesses. The air between them was a coiled serpent, the whole world holding its breath.

Damen attacked, a ringing three-stroke sequence that Laurent countered, circling so that his back was no longer to the door, but to the length of the training arena. When Damen attacked again, Laurent used the space behind him, moving back.

And further back. He was progressing through the same set of experiences that had derailed Govart: goading Damen into a straightforward fight only to shift his maneuvers at the last moment, impossible to pin down. His blade teased, slipping away without following through. He enticed, then stepped back.

Laurent could see the irritation in the set of Damen’s jaw. Still, he refused to exert himself. If Damen wanted a real fight, let him start one. Tap, tap, tap. They had by now traveled almost the full length of the training arena, and were drawing alongside the post. Laurent’s breathing had hardly changed.

The next time Damen engaged, Laurent ducked and swung around the post, so that he had the length of the training area again at his back.

“Are we just going to go up and down? I thought you’d push me at least a little,” said Laurent.

Damen unleashed a strike, full strength and with brutal speed, giving Laurent no time to do anything but bring up his sword. The blade caught with a screech of metal, the force of the impact crashing through Laurent’s wrists and shoulders, almost wrenching the sword from his hands and throwing him off balance as his injured shoulder screamed with pain. He staggered three paces back.

“You mean like that?” said Damen.

Laurent recovered well, moving back another step. He narrowed his eyes, studying Damen, reconfiguring his expectations. That strike could have killed a weaker man.

“I thought I’d let you go up and down a few times,” said Damen, “before I take you.”

“I thought you were down here because you couldn’t take me.”

This time when Damen attacked, Laurent put his whole body into weathering it, and as one blade raked shudderingly down the length of the other, he came up under Damen’s guard, so that Damen was forced into a startled defense and only with a flurry of steel flung him back.

“You _are_ good,” said Damen, voice incongruently pleased. Laurent’s heart kicked in his chest, and he hated himself for it.

Damen pressed forward, allowing no time for Laurent to disengage or recover. He was forced to bring all his strength to bear to block the attacks, the barrage jarring down Laurent’s wrists to his forearm and shoulder. Consistently now, Laurent was parrying two-handed.

Parrying, and countering in a deadly flash. He might be smaller than Damen, less powerful, but Laurent was agile, and could turn on a hair. The quality of Damen’s gaze changed as they fought, a new kind of light leaking into the irises of his eyes. Yet even as Laurent threw all his strength behind his blows, Damen fought with the relaxed demeanor of a man already certain of his victory.

Damen disengaged, walking a circle around Laurent—giving him space to recover. Laurent’s hair was damp against the back of his neck; his breath was quick in his chest. He shifted his grip on his sword minutely, flexing his wrist.

“How’s your shoulder?” Damen said.

“My shoulder and I,” said Laurent, “are waiting to be shown a real fight.”

He swept his blade up, ready for the attack. It was satisfying, in a way, to slip away with elegant counters from that brute force that had driven other men to their knees. Yet more and more, Damen seemed able to anticipate his moves.

Damen was not Auguste—though he possessed the same innate strength, the same power that leant itself to leadership. He attacked with none of the pretense of Veretian swordsmanship. His style was wholly Akielon, violence stripped bare of any flourish, the maneuvers brutal in their simplicity. Wielded by any other man, Laurent would have won in a matter of seconds. 

But Damen was a force of nature. Laurent felt it like drowning, like suffocating, all the air torn from his lungs. He could pour every ounce of strength into this fight, and it would not matter. Every grueling hour on the training field, and it would make no difference. He could twist and parry and dance around every engagement, and still Damen would cut through it, repelling each small deception.

He swept Laurent’s blade out of the way, slammed the hilt of his sword into Laurent’s stomach, then threw Laurent down, his body landing hard enough on the sawdust to knock the wind out of his lungs.

“You can’t beat me in a real fight,” said Damen.

Anger was an unhinged jaw. Laurent felt himself swallowed, digested by it. Damen’s sword was at his throat, the sharp point of it so close that to breathe would be to impale himself. He slid his fingers into the sawdust. Damen was staring at him like he had always known this would happen, like there had never been any doubt in his mind. The tip of the sword traveled from Laurent’s throat down to his belly, rising and falling with shallow breaths.

“Yield,” he said.

 _No._ Laurent flung the sawdust into Damen’s eyes, watched him jerk instinctively as he was blinded with the gritty, stinging dryness. The sword shifted back, and Laurent rolled, grabbing his own blade from where it had fallen.

Laurent was breathing hard. Damen wiped the sawdust from his eyes and looked at him, features sour with distaste. A muscle jumped in his clenched jaw.

“You fight with the tactics of the coward,” said Damen.

“I fight to win,” said Laurent.

“Not well enough for that,” said Damen.

The desire for violence was unrestrained, a directionless force. It was not the tangible desire for death that Laurent had cradled from the time he was thirteen—this was something new. More than body or blood, Laurent wanted to cut into that composure, that surety with which Damen approached every battle, as if certain from the start that he would win. As if no man could ever be his equal. Laurent swung at him with killing force.

Damen swerved sideways and abruptly back, brought his sword up and still was forced to give ground. Laurent felt a burst of nauseating satisfaction as he compelled Damen to defend himself with every effort of muscle and sinew that his body could muster.

Laurent poured everything into the attack—mind, body, and soul. Behind his blade was every minute spent with muscles burning on the training field at Arles, every story he would never again hear in his brother’s voice, every ragged night at Chastillon with his senses dulled by wine. His body was a graveyard, a monument, a testament to every sharp piece of the past that he could not remove, weighted like the cuff around his wrist.

Everything—and it did not matter. Damen met the onslaught, took on Laurent’s best sword word, and began, step by step, to drive him back.

Laurent had trained with Auguste. He knew the ideas his brother had once held about fair play and honor. Laurent abandoned them. Auguste’s misguided belief in honor had not saved him from death. 

Laurent’s sword cut through a holding rope and Damen had to push away before the shelf of mounted armory it supported came crashing down on his head. Laurent shoved at a bench with his leg and sent it careening into Damen’s path. The armor that had spilled from the wall onto the sawdust became an obstacle course to force uneven footwork.

Laurent threw everything at Damen, drew every part of their surroundings desperately into the fight. And he was still unable to hold ground.

At the post, Laurent ducked instead of parrying, and Damen’s sword swung hard through thin air and then thunked into the wooden beam, lodging there so deeply that he had to let go the hilt and duck to avoid one of Laurent’s swings before he could pull it out.

In those seconds, Laurent bent, snatched up a knife that had scattered from one of the overturned benches and threw it, with deadly accuracy, at Damen’s throat.

Damen knocked it out of the air with his sword and kept advancing. He attacked and steel met steel, sliding all the way up to the tang. Laurent’s shoulder shuddered, and Damen pressed harder, forcing Laurent’s sword from his hand.

Damen slammed him into the paneled wall. A sound of raw, guttural frustration escaped Laurent’s lips; his teeth clicked together and the breath was knocked out of him. Damen pressed in, jammed his forearm to Laurent’s neck and cast his own sword aside as Laurent’s outflung hand dragged a knife from its hanging display on the wall and brought it driving towards Damen’s unprotected side.

“ _No you don’t,_ ” said Damen, and with his free hand caught Laurent’s wrist and knocked it hard against the wall, once, twice, until Laurent’s fingers opened and he dropped the knife.

Laurent thrashed with his entire body, calling on every bit of muscle and bone as he tried to wrench from Damen’s hold, a moment of violent animal struggle that pushed their hot, sweat-dampened bodies together. Damen absorbed it—shoved them both in against the wall—tightly enough to prohibit movement, but Laurent punched him in the throat with his free arm, hard enough that Damen choked and shifted, and then, with all the hard violence in him, Laurent drove his knee in.

Any other man would have crumbled, but Damen held his ground. He dragged Laurent away from the wall and flung him to the ground, where Laurent hit, body impacting hard on the sawdust. His shoulder was on fire, his lungs empty and gasping for breath. Still, he pushed himself dazedly up, propelled by the sheer force of the hatred he felt in that moment. He lunged for the knife, fingers closing around it, too late.

“ _That’s enough,_ ” said Damen, driving his knee hard into Laurent’s stomach, then throwing him onto his back and following him down. He had Laurent’s wrist in his grip, and he slammed it back against the sawdust so that Laurent released the knife. Damen’s body was an arc over his, pinning Laurent with his weight, with his hands on Laurent’s wrists, connecting them all in hard lines. Damen’s hair was dark, tendrilled with sweat. He tightened his grip on Laurent’s wrist, fingers pressing into flesh.

Half outside himself, Laurent released a last desperate sound. Motion was impossible; he was utterly trapped, anchored by Damen’s body. He felt himself shattering, split into pieces, that thirteen-year-old boy that he had harbored in some private corner of his heart suffocated by the undeniable reality of defeat.

For seven years, he had sustained himself on dreams of revenge. Now, in the course of one fight, Damen had crushed that dream, destroyed it mercilessly. Pinned in the sawdust, Laurent had been hollowed out, all the meat of him carved away.

They were both panting. It was every nightmare come true. Laurent had given everything, done all he could—and was left only with the cold truth that his best was not enough. That _he_ was not enough.

“Say it,” said Damen.

It was like handing a man a knife, and telling him to slit his own throat. _I will never avenge my brother. I am not_ good _enough to avenge my brother._ Shame wrapped cold fingers around Laurent’s throat, choking him.

“I _yield._ ” He could barely bring himself to say the words. _Auguste—Auguste, I’m sorry—_ Laurent turned his face away from Damen’s.

Perhaps he had always known that it would never be enough—those hours spent with a sword in his hand, that acquired taste for violence. Perhaps that was why he had been so ruthlessly, desperately broken on the day he had learned of his brother’s death. _I will never avenge you._ Laurent felt it, now, in the painful twist of his heart: he could live a thousand lifetimes, and never do justice to Auguste.

“I want you to know,” Damen said, the words thick and heavy as they fell from his lips, “that I could have done this any time when I was a slave.”

Laurent said, “ _Get off me._ ”

Damen thrust himself back, onto his knees. Laurent levered himself off the floor. He stood with his hand on the post for support, shoulder singing with pain, body limp with exhaustion. Damen’s gaze was a wound of its own, the past bleeding out between them.

“You want me to say it? That I could never have beaten you?” Laurent’s voice twisted up in his throat, words scraping their way past tongue and teeth. “I could never have beaten you.

“No, you couldn’t have. You’re not good enough. You would have come for revenge, and I would have killed you. That’s how it would have been between us. Is that what you would have wanted?”

“ _Yes,_ ” said Laurent. The admission tore its way out of his chest, raw and bloody. “He was everything I had.”

_Auguste, face split in a broad grin and eyes dancing with mischief. The voices he made when he read, a new one for each character. The warm heat of his hands, clasped around Laurent’s as he said, “Don’t worry, little brother, I—”_

“I know,” said Laurent, “that I was never good enough.” He had always known it, really. It had been his curse, since that day at Marlas: thirteen years old, gifted with a crown that he would never fit, shoes that he could never hope to fill. He had spent the past seven years chasing ghosts.

Damen said, “Neither was your brother.”

 _No._ “You’re wrong. He was—”

“What?”

“Better than I am. He would have—”

Laurent cut himself off. He pressed his eyes closed, releasing a breath that twisted itself into something like laughter. “Stopped you.”

It was the inexorable truth that had planted itself in his heart, roots stretching into every dark part of his body, growing in his mind from the time he was thirteen. He remembered Auguste, golden and perfect, the hero of every story. Death couldn’t touch him. Nothing could touch him—Laurent had known it, down to his bones. His brother had been everything good, everything right in the world. To extinguish Auguste was to live without hope.

And yet Auguste was dead. And the man who had killed him was here, alive.

When Laurent opened his eyes, Damen was holding the discarded knife. He grasped Laurent’s hand and pressed the hilt to his palm. Braced it. Drew it to his abdomen, so that they stood in a familiar posture. Laurent’s breath caught in his throat.

“Stop me,” said Damen.

Laurent searched for it—that desire that he had cultivated, that hunger to spill blood. The anger that he had sheltered, the fury that he had caressed like a lover, the rage that he had used as a shield against the hollow world, devoid of Auguste.

It wasn’t gone. Not entirely. There was still—something. A lingering heat, curled in the marrow of his bones. But it was far away, as if to reach it meant unearthing some discarnate grave. Laurent felt the weight of the weapon in his hand. He looked at the man in front of him, and saw what the violence would mean: another body, another tomb, so much blood in the sawdust.

Damen was staring at him. “I know that that feels like,” he said.

“You’re unarmed,” said Laurent.

Damen was looking at him like he was beautiful. Like he could see the death in Laurent’s eyes, and it didn't scare him. The moment between them was changing, an irrevocable shift in the air. Laurent could not bring himself to fight it. The knife thudded to the sawdust.

In the empty palm of Laurent’s hand, there was something growing, something new—some promise whose edges he could only being to grasp, the barest thread of it shining like gold—

Damen stepped back. He stared at Laurent from two paces away, breathing roughened. Laurent’s own heart was hammering, beating a new pattern into the bones of his ribcage.

Around them, the training arena was strewn with the disorder of their fight: benches overturned, armor pieces scattered across the floor, a banner half torn from the wall.

Damen said, “I wish—”

Laurent waited, breathless, like a man on the edge of a precipice. The past was a river, eddying around them, smooth and insubstantial and inescapable. But between them there was only air, only breath, only those words, broken off in the silence.

 _I wish._ It hung, empty, over the sawdust. Laurent had spent years of his life on wishing, had starved on wishes, had choked on them. He waited, but Damen didn’t speak again—only took his sword and left.

Laurent stood, alone, with that unfinished wish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello :) let me know if u can tell at which point in writing this chapter i was drunk lol
> 
> in other news: my schedule has abruptly become much busier, so it's taking me longer to write each new chapter. but i am still trying to update at least every few days! i appreciate ur patience, and thank u to everyone who's continuing to stick with this story! i'm so excited to finish the series aaaaaaa so many thoughts + plans in my brain >:)


	9. Chapter Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for vague references to past abuse

The next morning, they had to sit next to each other. Laurent had always thought his own country preoccupied with performance, yet that was exactly what these games felt like: petty ritual, a decorative show when they should be riding south. Seated above the green oblong meadow that formed the arena, he felt the same tension echoed in Damen.

The joint thrones today were under a silk awning, which provided some measure of relief from the blazing sun. Covered head to toe in silk, Laurent felt perspiration beading along his brow, and found himself grateful for the shade. The sun shone beautifully over the field, and the tiered stands and the grassy side slopes, stage for a contest of physicality.

Damen’s arms and thighs were bare. He wore a short chiton, pinned once at his shoulder. Laurent sat at his side, face turned obstinately away. Next to him were the Veretian nobility: Lady Vannes murmuring into the ear of her new female pet, Guion and his wife Loyse, Enguerran the Captain. Beyond that was the Prince’s Guard, Jord, Lazar and the others in blue livery, standing arrayed, the starburst banners waving above them.

To Damen’s right sat Nikandros, and beside him the conspicuously empty seat meant for Makedon.

Makedon wasn’t the only one absent. The grassy slopes and tiered stands were missing Makedon’s soldiers, depleting them of half their men. It was exactly what Laurent had risked his life yesterday trying to prevent, the reason he had placed his throat in front of steel. Frustration was a persistent pressure in the back of his mind—if only Damen had kept a tighter rein on his temper, they might have prevented Makedon’s defection. But it was, apparently, now too late for that.

Nikandros said, “He’s not coming.”

“Give him time,” said Damen. An instinctive platitude—the tone of his voice did not inspire hope. There was no hint of an arrival.

Nikandros said, without looking next to him, “Your uncle has wiped out half of our army with two hundred men.”

“And a belt,” said Laurent, mildly.

He looked out at the half-filled stands and the banks of grass, where Veretian and Akielon alike gathered for best vantage, casting his gaze over the tents by the royal stands, where slaves prepared goods, and then further tents, where attendants prepared the first of the athletes for competition.

After a moment, Damen said, “At least someone else has a chance to win at javelin.”

He stood. Like a rippling wave, all those around him stood, and all those gathered from the tiered stands to the meadow. Damen lifted his hand, posture exuding command. There was no trace of misgiving, no hint of doubt. Laurent remembered Auguste, leading his men into battle without any indication of fear in his features.

“Today, we pay homage to the fallen. We fight together, Veretian and Akielon. Compete with honor. Let the games begin.”

***

Target shooting created a few disputes, which everyone seemed to enjoy. To the surprise of the Akielons, Lazar won the archery. To the satisfaction of the Akielons, Aktis won the spear throwing. Veretians whistled at Akielon bare legs, and sweated in their long sleeves. In the stands, slaves rhythmically raised and lowered fans and brought shallow cups of wine that everyone drank except Laurent.

An Akielon called Lydos won at trident. Jord won at long sword. A young soldier called Pallas won at short sword, and then he won at spear, and then he stepped onto the field to try for a third victory, at wrestling.

He came forward naked, as was the custom in Akielos. He was a handsome youth with the physique of a champion, close to Laurent in age. Elon, his opponent, was a young man from one of the southern provinces. The two men scooped oil from the receptacle brought to them by the stewards, anointed their bodies with it, then they slung their arms around one another’s shoulders and, on the signal, heaved.

At first, it was impossible not to think of the arena. Memory flashed—past performances, pets painted and gasping, crying pretty tears over perfumed violence. Laurent felt the ghost of his uncle’s touch on his thigh; his heart pounded as, for a moment, he was fourteen, and outside his body.

But this was not his uncle’s court. The crowd cheered as the men grappled, their bodies straining against each other in slippery hold after slippery hold, until Pallas finally had Elon panting, on the grass, the sounds an eruption from the crowd. But if there was an eroticism in the performance, it was the eroticism of bodies well made, the display one of skill, the tension between competitors born from mutual respect. At the end of it, Pallas offered his hand to Elon, and they rose together.

Pallas ascended the dais, victorious, his hair a little tangled with oil. The spectators hushed with expectation. Laurent frowned, unsure of what to expect. The apprehension was thickly layered in the air. Pallas dropped to his knees in front of Damen, almost glowing with pride. He was nervous, happy, flushed and still breathing hard.

“If it please my lords and ladies,” said Pallas, “I claim the honor of combat with the King.”

There was a swell of approbation from the crowd. Pallas was a rising star, and everyone seemed eager to see the King fight. Connoisseurs of combat, Laurent supposed that many of those here must live for these types of matches, when the best of the best took on the kingdom’s established champion.

Damen rose from the throne, and put his hand to the gold brooch at his shoulder. Laurent’s heart crawled into his throat. The garment dropped and the crowd roared its approval. Damen descended the dais unselfconsciously, striding onto the field, every line of his body painted in sunlight. The attendants took up his garment from where it had fallen.

On the grass, Damen reached his cupped hands into the receptacle held by the steward, and scooped out the oil, smearing it over his naked body. On the dais, Nikandros had gone stiff, lips parted in poorly restrained shock. His hand twitched, instinctively, as if to reach out and touch.

Laurent knew what he saw. That bronzed skin, smooth and unblemished, stretched taut over bone and muscle, the body carved like art—interrupted, suddenly, by the angry, jagged scars. They had faded across his back, lines no longer red and bloody. Left behind was the puckered skin, slightly pinked, the scars so numerous and tangled that it was impossible to tell the start or end of them. Like blood on a field of flowers, the ugliness of violence was painful, incongruent with all the beauty of him.

On the field, Damen was nodding to Pallas, who was nervous, excited, euphoric, eyes full of the golden wonder of his King. Damen put his hand on Pallas’ shoulder, and the youth mirrored the position. Laurent released a breath. He remembered the weight of those hands, the warmth of that touch on bare skin.

Damen’s eyes caught the sun as he fought, set alight with the intensity of his concentration. There was an unmistakable playfulness to the expression, as if he could think of no greater pleasure than this unadorned straining of bodies, the pure physicality of competition. The bout lasted only two minutes, before Damen locked his arm around Pallas’ neck and held him down, absorbing every surge, every struggle, until Pallas was stiff with strain, then shaking with it, then spent, and the match was won.

Damen smiled as he helped the young soldier to his feet, grasping his forearm good-naturedly. Pallas had the slightly dazed expression of a man waking from a dream, breathless and adoring. They stood still while the attendants scraped the oil from their bodies, and toweled them down. After, Damen returned to the dais, where he spread his arms for the attendants to re-pin his clothing. Laurent watched as a bead of sweat made its way from neck to the juncture of shoulder, following the hard planes of Damen’s back, over scarred skin to the smooth line of his waist and then lower, tracing—

“Good fight,” said Damen, retaking his place on the throne.

For a moment, Laurent could not bring himself to tear his gaze away. He was struck by the utter impossibility of the man sitting next to him—by that mountainous strength, that powerful slope of profile, each curling tendril of hair that whispered against his neck.

“What is it?” said Damen, waving over some wine.

“Nothing,” said Laurent, and found somewhere else to put his eyes. Below, attendants were clearing the field for the okton.

“What can we expect next? I really feel,” said Vannes, “it might be anything.”

On the field the okton targets were being set up at spaced intervals. Nikandros stood up.

“I’m going to inspect the spears that will be used in the okton. I would be honored,” said Nikandros, “if you would join me.”

He said it to Damen. The words were a thinly veiled excuse; strained, transparent. Damen did not see it. He smiled at the kyros, genuine and warm, pleased by the idea. The match with Pallas had brought out a sort of boyish excitement in him, body relaxing where it had been held in tension earlier. Laurent could feel the sense of belonging in Damen, the way his homeland traditions grounded him.

He stood. Laurent watched them leave, talking comfortably, old friends. Damen’s smile was bright and uncomplicated; Nikandros’ answering smile was drawn. His eyes flickered, periodically, to Damen’s back, now covered over with cloth. Laurent felt nausea curling in the pit of his stomach.

He sat very still, pulse thundering in his ears. The voices of the nobles around him were a dull buzz, conversations blurred, two languages twisting into each other. Below, the attendants were placing the targets. Laurent stood, abruptly, as the last piece of equipment was hefted into place.

“I will fetch the King,” he heard himself say. He could feel the bemused looks of his retinue, seated on the dais. He did not care. He walked quickly, heart contorting in his chest.

A quick command uttered to an attendant, and he had found the tent. He lifted the flap impatiently, the slightest rustle of cloth—and froze.

They were facing away from him, Damen’s chiton hanging from his waist, exposing his torso. Nikandros’ hands were spread across the bare skin of his back, fingers trembling slightly as they pressed into the scars. His expression was one of stark horror, features twisted in revulsion, as if unable to comprehend what he was seeing—unable to stomach the cruelty of it. Damen stood silently, face flushed. He looked almost—embarrassed. Laurent felt something kick in his stomach.

“Who did this to you?”

It was like seeing the darkest, most horrible part of himself, excised and reflected across Damen’s back, across Nikandros’ face. That awful, gnawing creature—that desire to hurt. To kill. Laurent remembered the sick twist of satisfaction he’d felt, looking down at the pulped mess of skin like raw meat. He remembered the saccharine taste of vengeance, how it had slid cold down his throat.

“I did,” Laurent said.

Damen turned. Nikandros turned, too. In Damen’s face, there was wary surprise—in Nikandros’, naked outrage.

Laurent said, “I meant to kill him, but my uncle wouldn’t let me.”

His focus was all on Nikandros. Hatred burned in the kyros’ gaze; his body tensed with the need for violence. It felt—correct, somehow. _This_ was how you looked at a man who hurt those you loved. Laurent recognized the loathing, corrosive as acid. He understood it. It was how he had looked at Damen, the first time he saw him in Arles.

Nikandros took a step forward, hand on the hilt of his sword. But Damen stopped him, fingers a restraining vice on the kyros’ arm.

Laurent said, “He sucked my cock too.” _Let go—_ the thought was toothed, sharp as a bite, the anticipated violence stymied in all its promise of catharsis.

Nikandros said, “Exalted, I beg the permission to challenge the Prince of Vere to a duel of honor for the insult that he has done to you.”

“Denied,” said Damen.

“You see?” said Laurent. “He has forgiven me for the small matter of the whip. I have forgiven him for the small matter of killing my brother. All praise the alliance.” He said it flippantly, as if it were simple. As if all the pain between them could ever be forgiven.

 _“You flayed the skin from his back_. _”_

“Not personally. I just watched while I had my man do it.”

He waited, breath heavy in his chest, for the moment that Damen’s features would change. For the moment he would release his grip, remember that cruelty, recognize all the seething poison in Laurent. Nikandros looked physically sick with the effort of repressing his anger. Laurent waited, heart pounding, for the same hatred to bleed into Damen.

“How many lashes was it? Fifty? One hundred? He might have died!”

Laurent said, “Yes, that was the idea.” _I wanted to kill you. Can’t you see that?_

“That’s enough,” said Damen, catching Nikandros as he stepped forward again. And then, “Leave us. Now. _Now,_ Nikandros.”

Angry as he was, Nikandros couldn’t disobey a direct order. He swept out of the tent, body singing with the tension of rage. Damen stood in front of Laurent with most of his clothing bunched in his hand.

Still—there was no anger. Only a weary search for understanding, brow furrowed as he studied Laurent’s face.

“Why would you do that? He’ll defect.”

It was not a question Laurent could answer. He was not sure he understood, entirely, the urge that had driven him to this tent, the infuriating frustration that coursed through his body now. He felt, desperately, some break in understanding, the need to force Damen to— _realize_ this.

“He’s not going to defect. He is your most loyal servant.”

“So you push him to the breaking point?”

 _I push you—_ Laurent wanted to say it, the words crawling up his throat— _I push you, and you never break. Why do you never break? How do you do it?_

“Should I have told him I didn’t enjoy it?” he said instead. “But I did enjoy it. I liked it most near the end, when you broke down.”

He waited, and still—nothing. It felt unhuman, the calm with which Damen faced him, when Laurent’s own thoughts were hardly more than a writhing mass of emotion, guilt and anger and hatred all twisted together, crossing in violent patterns like the lines across Damen’s back.

Damen said, “What are you doing here?”

 _You should hate me,_ Laurent thought, _Like he does._ _Why don’t you hate me?_

“I came to collect you,” he said. “Nikandros was taking too long.”

It was a flimsy lie. Damen saw through it, as he saw through everything. “You didn’t have to come here. You could have sent a messenger.”

In the pause that followed, Laurent could not stop his eyes from shifting sideways. They slid involuntarily to the polished mirror, positioned behind Damen, all those scars reflected in the shining glass. Laurent searched for that vindication he had clung to like a lifeline, the satisfaction of revenge. He searched for the man he had been at Arles, who held cruelty like a shield, like a prayer.

But he was gone, and in his place was only this: twisted lines in smooth skin, ugly and violent. Laurent swallowed the realization like a burning coal, throat turned to ash as he thought of the man who had watched the whip fall, again, and again, and again. Who had enjoyed it. He did not know how to untangle past from present, how to release everything he had been.

Their eyes met again. It was too much. Damen was looking at him as if it were already over, already buried and laid to rest. “Admiring your handiwork?”

Laurent did not understand how Damen could not see it—that fundamental wrongness, the roots of it stretching through his body. How he could absorb the past, could swallow and digest it, and turn hungry towards the future. Laurent’s own throat felt closed off, his chest tight.

“You’re due back in the stands.”

“I’ll join you after I’ve dressed. Unless you want to step closer. You can help stick in the pin.”

 _He has forgiven me for the small matter of the whip._ He hadn’t really meant it, hadn’t ever thought—

“Do it yourself,” said Laurent.

***

The course for the okton was almost fully marked out by the time they returned, seating themselves side by side, wordlessly.

The fever pitch of the crowd was bloodthirsty. The okton brought out something hungry in them, some promise of danger, threat turned spectacle. The second of two targets was hammered onto its struts, and the attendants gave the all clear. In the heat of the day, anticipation was an insect buzz, rising to a commotion on the south-western side of the field.

Makedon’s arrival, mounted, armed, with a cadre of men behind him, caused a burst of activity in the stands. Nikandros was half rising from his seat, three of his guards placing their hands on the hilts of their swords.

Makedon wheeled his horse in front of the stands, to face Damen directly.

Damen said, “You missed the javelin.”

“A village was attacked in my name,” said Makedon. “I want the chance for requital.”

Makedon had a voice made for generalship that echoed across the stands, and he used it now, making sure he was heard by every spectator gathered for the games.

“I have eight thousand men who will fight with you in Karthas. But we won’t fight under a coward or a green leader who has yet to prove himself on the field.”

Makedon looked across at the course laid out on the field for the okton, and then he looked right back at Laurent.

“I will pledge,” said Makedon, “if the Prince will ride.”

Laurent heard the reaction of those around him. He understood what they saw. Sitting next to Damen, he seemed a clear athletic inferior. No Akielon had ever seen him fight, or take exercise. He had not participated in any of today’s contests. He had done nothing more than sit, elegant and relaxed, as now.

“Veretians do not train in the okton,” said Damen.

“In Akielos, the okton is known as the sport of kings,” said Makedon. “Our own King will take the field. Does the Prince of Vere lack the courage to ride against him?”

It was an attempt to humiliate him—that much was clear. Makedon was willing to return to the fold only once he had proved the inferiority of the Veretians with which he fought, the dominance of Akielon superiority. There was not a shred of doubt in his mind that Laurent would fail.

Next to him, Damen stood, silently. His face was impassive, but his shoulders were all a tense line, waiting for Laurent to speak. Laurent could see that he was expected to sidestep, to use the clever words he so often drew on to avoid the abject humiliation that every Akielon in these stands expected, were he to accept the challenge. Even Damen—who had seen him fight, who had seen him ride—assumed that he would fail.

But Laurent had never been one to back down from a challenge.

The flags fluttered loudly. The stands were silent, to a man. Makedon was staring at him with a smug twisting of lips, Damen with cautious uncertainty.

“Why not?” said Laurent.

***

Mounted, Laurent faced the course, holding his horse ready at the starting line. He breathed deeply, smoothing a hand down the animal’s neck. Two horses down from his own, Damen’s fractious mount shifted, eager for the horn that would signal his start.

Laurent’s spears were tipped in blue. Damen’s in red. Of the other three competitors, Pallas, already triple-crowned, carried spears tipped in green. Aktis, who had won the spear throwing on the flat, had white. Lydos black.

The okton, Laurent had learned before the games today, was a competitive display in which spears were thrown from horseback. Called the sport of kings, it was a test of marksmanship, athleticism, and skill with a horse: competitors must ride between two targets in a constant figure eight, throwing spears. Then, amid the deadly flash of hooves, each rider must bend seamlessly to pick up new spears, launching back in for another circuit without stopping—riding eight circuits in total. The challenge was to achieve as many bullseyes with the spear as possible, while evading the flying spears of the other riders.

Laurent did not entirely understand all the fuss; it seemed straightforward enough. Of course, if you missed you might kill your opponent. But he would not miss.

He understood that the sport would be demanding. Probably, Akielons spent a great deal of time training, for all the pomp they gave the activity. But Laurent had no doubts about his riding; it was second nature, all the hours spent on horseback until the saddle was a second skin. It was true that spears were an Akielon war-weapon, and not typically used by Veretians. But they were employed often in boar-hunting, one of the favored sports of Veretian nobility. Laurent had spent enough time hunting to know how to throw a spear. And with the okton, the target would not be a moving, breathing animal intent on escape—so really, it seemed altogether easier than tracking and subduing sanglier. Laurent surveyed the targets and the course, visualizing the angle of the throw in his mind’s eye.

He could feel Damen’s anxious gaze, prickling over the back of his neck. Down the line, his horse continued shifting, all the tension wound in Damen’s body transmitting itself to his mount. It was, really, a bit insulting. Laurent was not the spoiled princeling that Akielos expected—if anyone understood that, it should be Damen.

On the sidelines, Paschal waited with the other physicians, ready to patch and sew in case of injury. Laurent rolled his shoulder slightly, the bandage clinging tight to skin under his jacket. There was still the dull ache, but the wound had healed enough that it should not present problems. Laurent was familiar with the push of body through pain.

The expected winner of this match was, of course, Damianos, the Akielon King. The peak of all Akielon warriors; the champion of the nation. The other three riders could not hope to beat him—but they would set their sights on Laurent, eager for a chance to outshine the Veretian prince. If Laurent hoped to win the respect of these men, he had only one option: he must win.

He took up his first spear and faced the course calmly. Hefting the weapon, he felt its weight. He studied the field once more, adjusting slightly his mental calculations as he thought of the lazy summer breeze. To hit a target was a simple matter of math, the necessary force and the proper angles. Laurent had spent a great deal of time studying such calculations, learning the angles. He had spent also a great deal of time training his body, that he might produce the required force. 

The starts were staggered, and it was Laurent who had drawn first. The horn sounded; the crowd hollered. For a moment Laurent was racing alone across the field, with the eyes of every spectator heavy on his back.

If Makedon had hoped to prove Veretians inferior riders, he would be disappointed. Laurent could ride. His horse moved with his breath, bodies in effortless communication, wind a familiar drag against skin. His first spear soared, blue-tipped: a bullseye. Everyone screamed. And then the second horn sounded, and Pallas was off, riding hard behind Laurent, and then the third, and Damen’s horse had flung itself into a gallop.

With royalty from rival countries on the field, the okton became one of the noisiest events imaginable. Laurent’s second spear hit its mark effortlessly; in his peripheral vision, he saw the flash of green as Pallas did the same. As he rounded the course, he saw that Aktis’ spear had landed right of center. Lydos’ throw had been short, spearing the grass, so that the horses must swerve around it.

Damen rode without taking his eyes from the field, throwing his spears with almost frightening efficiency. He did not look at the targets, as if sure before the weapon had left his hands that it would meet its mark.

By the end of the first circuit, it was clear where the true competition lay: Laurent, Damen and Pallas were hitting bullseyes. Aktis, practiced on the flat, did not have the same ability from horseback; nor did Lydos.

Laurent snatched up his second set of spears without slowing, taking his horse inside Lydos’ to make his shot. He did not flinch as Lydos’ own throw passed a half-foot from him; he had selected his position carefully, and knew where to place his body to avoid the trajectory of the other spears. There was no danger, not when he could evaluate the angle of arm, poised to throw, and see immediately the path that the weapon would take.

Another bullseye. Laurent could feel the excitement of the crowd, tension rising with every throw. He, Damen, and Pallas all had yet to miss a throw—at this rate, it would be a three-way tie. Laurent wondered, briefly, if this was common—surely not, based on the crowd’s reaction. There were now three more circuits. Two. One.

The course was a stream of surging horseflesh, of deadly spears and hooves that flung up turf. They thundered into the final circuit, buoyed by the elation, the ecstasy of the crowd. Damen, Laurent, and Pallas were dead-even in score, and for a moment it seemed flawless, balanced, as though they were all part of a single whole.

It was a mistake anyone might have made. A simple miscalculation: Aktis threw his spear too early. Laurent saw it; saw the spear leave Aktis’ hand, saw its trajectory, saw it hit with a sickening thunk not the target, but the crucial support strut that was holding the target up.

At galloping speed, all five riders had a momentum that could not be halted. Lydos and Pallas loosed their spears. Both throws were straight and true, but the target, swaying and collapsing without its strut, was no longer there.

Lydos’ spear, shearing through air on the other side of the course, was going to hit either Pallas, or Laurent, who was riding alongside him. But that was not what jammed Laurent’s heart into his throat.

The second spear, Pallas’ spear, was aimed directly at Damen.

Laurent could see, in an instant, the path it would take. The way it would tear itself, bloody, through his chest. He could see, in the way that Damen set his jaw, that he would not dodge it—not with other riders on the field who might be struck. The second held itself, suspended, Laurent’s breath caught in his chest as the words spilled into his throat— _just move. Just move, and save yourself._

But the panic was useless. For in the next moment Damen reacted, lifting an arm and catching the spear in midair, his hand closing hard around the shaft, the momentum of it wrenching his shoulder back. He absorbed it, thighs flexing on the saddle as he held himself steady. The cries of the crowd were deafening. Laurent felt a surge of relief.

There was no time to enjoy it. Beside him, Pallas had frozen. In a stricken moment of choice, Pallas could only decide whether to dodge and risk his cowardice killing a prince, or stand his ground and receive a spear to the throat. His fate was tied to Laurent’s—they could both see it, clear as the spearpoint driving towards them.

Laurent cursed Akielon honor. He knew that Pallas would not dodge, as Damen had not dodged—though if he did, then Laurent, too, could simply duck, allowing the spear to fly past them both. In the handful of seconds, Laurent judged the outcome, and acted without hesitation. He released his reins and, as the horse slid from under his body, he jumped—not out of the way, but into the path of the spear, leaping from his horse to Pallas’, dragging them both to the left. Pallas swayed, shocked, and Laurent bodily kept him down low in the saddle. The spear sailed past them and landed in the tufted grass like a javelin.

The crowd went wild.

Laurent ignored it. He reached down and neatly filched Pallas’ last spear for himself. And, keeping Pallas’ horse at a gallop—as the sounds of the crowd swelled to a crescendo—he threw it, sending it flying right into the center of the final target.

Completing the okton one spear ahead of Pallas and of Damen, Laurent drew his horse up in a little circle, and met Damen’s gaze, raising his brows, as if to say, “Well?”

Damen grinned. He hefted the spear he had caught, and from where he was on the far side of the course, threw; let it go sailing over the full, impossible length of the field, to thunk into the target alongside Laurent’s spear, where it rested, quivering.

Pandemonium.

***

After, they crowned each other with laurels. They were borne to the dais by the thronging crowd, surrounded by cheers. Damen dipped his head to receive the prize from Laurent’s fingers. Laurent eschewed his gold circlet in favor of the ring of leaves.

Drink flowed. The new camaraderie was a heady ambrosia, and it was too easy to get carried away by it. Laurent felt himself swept up in it, the warmth a slow burn in his chest, the boyish excitement pounding at his temples.

As the afternoon deepened into evening, they moved inward, to end the day to the accompaniment of shallow cups of Akielon wine and the soft sounds of a kithara. There was a fragile feeling of fellowship solidifying among the men, which Laurent had begun to understand that they needed—which gave renewed hope for tomorrow’s campaign.

The games had been a success. A small victory; Laurent allowed the kernel of it to sink into his chest, glowing like an ember. Their men would ride out unified, a feat that he had never truly hoped to accomplish. More and more, the impossible seemed suddenly within reach, as long as Damen was at his side.

Laurent took his place on one of the lounging couches like he was born to it. Damen sat alongside him. The new-lit candles illuminated the expressions of the men around them, and the evening lighting faded the rest of the hall into a pleasant, hazy gloom.

Out of the gloom came Makedon.

He was flanked by a small retinue, two soldiers in their notched belts, and an attending slave. He came straight across the hall, and stopped right in front of Laurent.

The whole room went silent. Makedon and Laurent faced on another. The silence stretched out.

“You have the mind of a snake,” Makedon said.

“You have the mind of an old bull,” said Laurent.

They stared at one another. Laurent did not allow his gaze to waver.

After a long moment, Makedon waved at the slave, who came forward with a fat-bellied bottle of Akielon spirits and two shallow cups.

“I will drink with you,” said Makedon.

Makedon’s expression did not change. It was like the offer of a door from an impenetrable wall. Shock rippled over thro om, and every eye in the hall turned to Laurent.

He understood the amount of pride that Makedon had swallowed to make this offer, a gesture of friendship to an indoor princeling half his age. He understood that it would not have been possible, had he not won Akielon respect with sweat and blood and the hefting of spears.

Laurent glanced at the wine that the slave had poured, nausea churning in his gut. He knew the sour-sweet smell of it, the way it felt washing through blood, blurring the edges of his body.

He knew, also, that to turn it away would be to crush underfoot any goodwill he had cultivated through the okton. Makedon would never respect him; there would remain, always, a fracture between their two troops. If Laurent hoped to win a war, it could only be done with unified men. The body was a small price to pay.

Laurent picked up the cup in front of him, drained it, then returned it to the table.

Makedon gave a slow nod of approval, lifted his own cup, downed it.

And said, “Again.”

***

Later, when a great many overturned cups scattered the low table, Makedon leaned forward and told Laurent he must try griva, the drink from his own region, and Laurent downed it and said it tasted like swill, and Makedon said, “Ha, ha, true!” Later, Makedon told the story of his first games, when Ephagin won the okton, and the bannermen grew misty-eyed, and everyone had another drink. Later, everyone roared when Laurent was able to balance three empty cups on top of each other, while Makedon’s cups fell over.

In the shallow Akielon cups, the wine tasted different. Or maybe it was the warm light, flickering like a campfire, or the presence of Damen, smiling helplessly next to him. Laurent felt himself softening, and yet the fear was held at bay. Chastillon, his uncle, the hard weight of the past—it all felt removed, alien among these new faces, these new men. But not gone—never, entirely, gone.

Later, Makedon took Laurent by the shoulder and told him about the hunting in his own region, where there were no longer lions as in days of old, but still great beasts befitting a king’s hunt. Hunting reminiscences went on for several more cups and brought out a great deal of fellow feeling. Everyone was toasting lions by the time Makedon clasped Laurent by the shoulder again in a way that indicated his farewell, and rose, making for bed. The bannermen followed him, weaving.

Laurent maintained a scrupulous posture until they were all gone, feeling the drink that coursed through his body, relaxing muscle with its inescapable touch. Damen spread his arm over the back of his own seat, gazing at him.

After a long moment, Laurent said, “I’m going to need some help standing up.”

***

The world went dizzy when he stood. Laurent slung his arm around Damen’s neck, his full weight pressing down through the broad shoulders. Damen’s hand came up, steadying his waist, and Laurent’s heart flipped as the heat of the touch suffused through his skin. Thoughts dulled by wine, there was for a moment only body, and Laurent leaned into the hands.

Damen said, “The Prince and I are retiring,” and waved the lingering slaves out.

“It’s this way,” Laurent said, the words thick on his tongue. “Probably.”

The hall was strewn with the last bits of the gathering, wine cups and empty couches. They passed an Akielon bannerman, sprawled out on one of them, his head on his arms, sleeping as deeply as if in his own bed. He was snoring.

Laurent felt flushed, boyish. The day was wrapped up all in the excitement of the games, everything blurred around the edges. “Is today the first time you’ve been beaten in an okton?”

“Technically, it was a draw,” said Damen.

“Technically,” Laurent scoffed. _His_ spear had hit the target first, hadn’t it? “I told you I was quite good at riding. I used to beat Auguste all the time when we raced at Chastillon. It took me until I was nine to realize he was letting me win. I just thought I had a very fast pony. You’re smiling.”

There was no shield to it, like this. Damen’s face was so close, the dimples soft points of shadow. Laurent wanted to reach out, to touch them. They stood in one of the passages, wells of moonlight from the open archways to their left.

“Am I talking too much? I can’t hold alcohol at all.”

“I can see that.” Damen was staring down at him like he could think of no greater delight than to be here, under this archway, in this moonlight. Laurent felt unbalanced, too aware of the sensation of it, heart racing.

“It’s my fault,” he frowned, trying to keep the words precise. It was difficult—they spilled off his tongue too quickly. “I never drink. I should have realized I’d need to, with men like these, and made an effort to…build up some sort of tolerance…” the frown deepened.

“Is that how your mind works?” said Damen. “And what do you mean, you never drink? I think you’re protesting a little much. You were drunk the first night I met you.”

It came back, in a tilting rush. The shock of that night, the cold curve of the bottles, the sour taste on the back of his tongue. Laurent blinked, attempting to separate past and present. “I made an exception,” he said, “that night. Two and a half bottles. I had to force myself to get it down. I thought it would be easier drunk.” _Everything bad is easier drunk._

“You thought what would be easier?” said Damen.

“‘What’?” said Laurent. “You.”

The honesty slipped out of his throat, too easily, the answer obvious. He said it softly, arm still curved around Damen’s neck, struggling with his eyes for focus. They were gazing at one another, halted in the half-light of the passage.

“My Akielon bed slave,” said Laurent, “named for the man who killed my brother.”

He felt it, then—the pressure of it, a weight in his chest, his heart swelling painfully, bruised and aching. In the moonlight, Damen looked as he had in the sun: beautiful.

“It’s not much further,” he said. His voice made Laurent’s chest hurt.

They went through passages, past the high archways and the windows along the northern side with their Veretian grilles. It wasn’t unusual for two young men to wander the halls together, swaying, after a revel—even among princes—and for a moment it felt almost as if they were what they seemed to be: brothers in arms. Friends.

The guards on either side of the entrance were too well trained to react to the presence of royalty leaning all over each other. They passed through the outer doors to the innermost chamber. Here, the low, reclining bed was in the Akielon style, the base carved in marble. It was simple, open to the night from its base to its curved headrest.

“No one is to enter,” Damen ordered the guards.

It was impossible to ignore the implication—the Akielon King entering a bedchamber with a young man in his arms and ordering everyone out—but Laurent could not bring himself to care. Everyone already thought they were fucking, anyway. He was used to the speculation that carried itself, always, to his bedroom. Right now, he knew only that he did not want Damen to leave.

Tomorrow, he could regret it—tomorrow, when his thoughts had returned and his mind was sharply ordered once more.

Now, there was only the wine, the gentle blurring of boundaries, the sturdy heat of arms. Like a man pulled under by a current, Laurent was lost to it, breathless and drowning in all that his body wanted.

Damen unlooped Laurent’s arm from his neck, disengaged himself. Laurent took an unsteady step forward, feeling the absence, and lifted a hand to his jacket, blinking.

“Attend me,” he said. He meant his voice to sound imperious, but the words felt somehow vulnerable.

“For old time’s sake?” said Damen.

His voice was soft, as if cradling the fragile past between them. He stepped forward and put his hands on the ties of Laurent’s jacket. It was sweetly, achingly familiar. He began to draw the ties from their moorings, hands passing over the curve of Laurent’s ribcage as the tie threaded through its eye.

The jacket tangled at Laurent’s wrist. It took some effort to get it off, disordering Laurent’s shirt. Damen stopped, his hands still inside the jacket.

He was looking at the bandage that Paschal had wrapped, tightly, around Laurent’s shoulder. There was some twist of pain in the eyes that Laurent could not decipher. Everything was warm—the breath, the hands, the fingers. The air between them.

Damen took a step back, said: “Now you can say you were served by the King of Akielos.”

“I could say that anyway.”

Lamp-lit, the room was filled with orange light, revealing its simple furnishing, the low chairs, the wall table with its bowl of fresh-picked fruit. It did not feel like Marlas. Not the way Laurent remembered it. He was a ghost, outside of time. He felt displaced, disconnected, tethered to the earth only by a body that his mind half-held to.

“I miss you,” said Laurent. “I miss our conversations.”

He said it because it was true, and he could not carry the weight of it. Not like this, heart unspooling in his throat, every wall he had built suddenly liquid and dust.

“You’re drunk,” said Damen. “You’re not yourself.” As if Laurent could be anyone else. “I should take you to bed.”

“Then, take me,” said Laurent. It was awful, the wanting. The way his body gnashed its teeth in search of that heat.

Damen maneuvered Laurent determinedly over to the bed, half pushed, half poured him onto it, as any soldier would help his drunk friend to the pallet in his tent.

Laurent lay where Damen put him, on his back in a half-open shirt, mind scattered, defenseless. There was the familiar iron taste of it on the back of his tongue, like blood from an old wound—every time he had been placed like this, helpless, lost in the great yawning cavern of a bed and another man’s hunger. The past rose up around him, with the silk, with the wine, with the night.

“You don’t like me like this?”

“You’re really…not yourself.”

“Aren’t I?” He supposed he was a self that Damen had never seen, boyish, un-sharpened, pliant and desperate. It was a self that he hated, a self that he could not erase, no matter how viciously he scrubbed at the stain of it. For a moment, the room flickered, past and present meeting. He thought he saw the flash of rings, on Damen’s fingers.

“No. You’re going to kill me when you sober up.”

“I tried to kill you. I can’t seem to go through with it. You keep overturning all my plans.”

Damen was doing something, moving about the room. Laurent could not force his eyes to focus, could do nothing but follow that shape, which became other shapes, other moments, other bodies.

“Laurent.” He was saying something, now, the words coming as if from underwater. He was still moving. Laurent lay, limbs loose on the bed, feeling as if his whole body was spinning. The world was dissolving at the edge of his fingers, sleep a quiet thief that crept, that pressed a knife to his throat. Where was he? The room was a dim swirl of light and color, warm orange and deep blue. He looked for the boar overhead, but could not find it—there was only stone. Where were the hands? They always came, with the sour taste of wine, with the body torn open on the bed. He was moving—no—whose room was this? He struggled for a moment to grasp onto it, the edge of thought that slipped through his fingers like sand.

The body was saying something, was leaving, voice a deep rumble that Laurent felt more than heard. He had not the strength left to fight sleep. It closed over him, mind slipping away, until everything was black, and then there was nothing.


	10. Chapter Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: references to past abuse

Laurent dragged his body from sleep, clawing towards consciousness. There was a moment of panic as he felt the sharp pulse of pain behind his skull, the thick weight of his tongue behind lips. It was a familiar sickness.

He had learned, when he was fourteen, a series of methods by which he might separate mind from body. The wine had felt frightening at first—he had grasped, desperate, for control over the blurred boundaries of body, the limbs that lay uselessly at his sides. But it was not long before the drink became a retreat, mind blissfully dizzy and blank, body pliant and disconnected. Enough wine, and his uncle’s hands became a bad dream, the details of those fingertips lost to the sour taste of grapes. Enough drink, and it was not happening to _him_ —only to the body left behind on the bed, to which he returned in the morning.

The feeling was so familiar that it took him a moment to remember where he was, when he was. The light cut into his eyes, spiraling pain into retinas. His stomach twisted as he pressed a palm to his forehead, grasping at memory. He recalled drinking in the hall, Makedon calling again and again to refill their cups. He remembered the bitter, burning griva. He remembered Damen, the hand on his waist, the dimpled smile in moonlight, the fingers tugging at laces—

It was all blurry, vague, time and color and voices swirling inextricably together. Laurent succumbed to his body, and was sick.

***

When he entered the hall, it was already full of Akielon bannermen. Vannes was seated next to Makedon at the long table, across from Nikandros. Damen stood at the head of the party, leaning over a sand tray scoured with marks. He paused when Laurent entered, looking up. They had started without him.

“Good morning,” said Damen.

“Good morning,” said Laurent.

He forced the words out after an infinitesimal pause, during which he undertook a heroic struggle with his body to prevent the embarrassed flush that tried to creep across his face. He kept his features smooth, sitting carefully on the throne-like seat of oak beside Damen, staring resolvedly at the space in front of him.

“Laurent!” said Makedon, the greeting genuine and surprising in its warmth. “I am glad to take up your invitation to hunt with you in Acquitart when this campaign is over.” He clapped Laurent on the shoulder.

Laurent said, “My invitation.”

He cast his mind out, desperately, for any memory of the interaction; he was provided only with the useless recollection of stacking a series of cups on top of one another.

“I sent a messenger to my homestead this very morning to tell them to begin preparing light spears for chamois.”

“You hunt with Veretians now?” said one of the bannermen—Philoctus.

“One cup of griva and you slept like the dead,” said Makedon. He clapped Laurent’s shoulder again. “This one had six! Can you doubt the power of his will? The steadiness of his arm in the hunt?”

“Not your uncle’s griva,” said a horrified voice.

“With two such as us on the ride, there won’t be a chamois left in the mountains.” Another shoulder clap. The abrupt motion twisted Laurent’s already-sensitive stomach into knots. “We go now to Karthas to prove our worth in battle.”

This provoked a wave of soldierly camaraderie. Laurent did not typically engage in soldierly camaraderie, and did not know what to do.

Damen stepped forward to the sand tray, repressing a smile.

“Meniados of Sicyon sent a herald to hold talks with us. At the same time, he launched attacks on our village, which were intended to sew dissent and disable our army,” Damen said, as he scoured yet another mark in the sand. “We’ve sent riders to Karthas to offer him the choice to surrender or to fight.”

Laurent sat up, spine prickling with unease. He had not been informed that riders were sent already to Karthas. His heart raced as he thought of his uncle, presented with his opponent’s next move, given ample time to construct a perfect trap to counter it. It was absurdly foolish—and yet no one else at the table seemed disturbed.

“You’ve sent riders to announce your plans?” said Laurent.

“This is the Akielon way,” said Makedon, as he might to a favored nephew a bit slow at learning. “An honorable victory will impress the kyroi and gain the favor that we need at the Kingsmeet.”

“I see, thank you,” said Laurent. _Akielon honor_ —he bit his tongue. Their opponent had already spurned the conventions of war with the attack on the village. What use was it to uphold a standard that your enemy disregarded?

“We attack from the north,” said Damen, “here, and here,” sand marks, “and bring the first of the watchtowers under our control before we make our assault on the fort.”

The tactics were straightforward, as everything was in Akielos, and the discussion progressed quickly to its conclusion. Laurent said very little. Vannes raised a few questions regarding Akielon maneuvers, which were answered to her satisfaction. Having received their orders for the march, the men rose to depart.

Makedon was explaining the virtues of iron tea to Laurent, and when Laurent massaged his own temple, wincing, Makedon rose and remarked, “You should have your slave fetch you some.”

“Fetch me some,” Laurent said, unthinking.

Damen rose. And stopped.

Laurent had gone very still. Damen stood there, awkwardly. Laurent’s heart crawled into his throat as their eyes met.

And then Damen looked away, towards Nikandros, who was staring at him. Nikandros was with a small group to one side of the table, the last of the men in the hall. He was the only one to have seen and heard. Damen just stood there.

“This meeting is over,” Nikandros announced to the men around him, too loudly. “The King is ready to ride.”

***

The hall cleared. He was alone with Damen. The sand tray was between them, the march on Karthas laid out in granular detail. Laurent reined in the shame and uncertainty that beat fists against his skull, kept his gaze cold.

“Nothing happened,” said Damen.

“Something happened,” said Laurent.

“You were drunk,” said Damen. “I took you back to your rooms. You asked me to attend you.”

“What else?” the words were forced out. Laurent felt breathless—he remembered hands, fingers, his jacket sliding off his shoulders—

“I did attend you,” said Damen.

“ _What else?_ ” The feel of silk on his skin, the heat that spread, flush, through his body, the way Damen’s voice had sunk low in his chest as they talked. It was all disjointed, unclear. Laurent felt the awful swell of bile in the back of his throat, the powerlessness of memory that slipped like water through fingers.

“Oh, stand down. You were too drunk to know your own name, let alone who you were with or what you were doing. Do you really think I’d take advantage of you in that condition?” Damen was looking at him like he could see that note of fear behind the question, like he could taste the panic behind the acidulous words.

Laurent stared at him. “No,” he said, awkwardly, the realization unfolding in his mind only as he turned his full attention to the question. “I don’t think you would.”

Still, the tension coiled through his body, heart stuttering against ribs. Damen waited, eyes searching Laurent’s face.

“Did I,” Laurent said. The words caught in his throat—he pushed them out, feeling as if he might choke on them. “Say anything.”

Damen released a breath, and Laurent’s body responded as if to a threat, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He lifted his eyes to meet Damen’s.

“You said you missed me,” said Damen.

Laurent flushed, the heat pulsing along cheekbones, ears, throat. He cursed the pathetic creature that the wine had left behind—all those desperate, crawling feelings.

“I see. Thank you for—” the edges of the statement were bitter on his tongue, “—resisting my advances.”

In the silence, he could hear voices beyond the door that had nothing to do with the two of them, or the honesty of the moment that was a physical ache, like a bruise in the air between them.

“I miss you too,” Damen said. “I’m jealous of Isander.”

“Isander’s a slave.”

“I was a slave.”

Damen was looking at him like the whole world could crumble away, and he wouldn’t notice.

It was too much—it hurt. Laurent tried, miserably, to remember how to breathe.

“You were never a slave, Damianos. You were born to rule, as I was.”

***

There was at least an hour yet before they’d ride out—it took time to arrange an army, composed of glinting steal and sweating men and the heavy bodies of horses, into straight lines.

Laurent moved like a ghost through the fort, his footsteps echoing the past. It was impossible to forget the last time he had prepared to ride from Marlas, the last time he had donned armor in these chambers. His body had been smaller, then, still softened by boyhood, and he had felt the sharp prick of fear as the attendants pulled on the straps of his armor.

And then Auguste had swept in, laughing, and fear had been impossible—not with his brother, golden as the sun, full of life and light and sure of victory. _Don’t worry, little brother, I’ll protect you_ he’d said, and the words had sunk down deep into the marrow of Laurent’s bones.

Laurent brought a hand up to the stripped stone walls, cool under fingertips even in the summer heat. His brother had given his life for this fort, for these walls. So much blood spilled into the earth, and now it would simply be given back. Laurent felt the hard ache of it, the incongruity with all Auguste had sacrificed. Yet he could not deny the fact that it was—better, this way. His brother, full all of laughter and sunlight, had never had any appetite for blood.

He arrived at the old door, and paused, nodding at the soldier that guarded it. Inside, the rooms were comfortable, well-lit, with a fire burning in the hearth and a series of furnishings including Akielon reclining seats, a wooden chest with cushions, and a low table in front of the fire.

The older woman sat, in her gray skirts, staring into the fire. The girl stood in front of the window, watching the Akielon soldiers pass below, her little hands gripped in fists. They turned when Laurent entered, and a moment passed in which they both simply stared, blinking, at his figure in the doorway.

Then—“Your Highness,” the woman spoke all in a rush, rising from her seat to bow. The girl darted her eyes between them, mirroring the movement clumsily.

“Please,” Laurent said, “Don’t—” He moved closer, gesturing for the woman to sit. The girl hovered by the window.

A moment passed, in which the woman did not sit. The three of them stood, gazing at each other.

“What was his name?” said Laurent, finally.

She was silent. Then: “Michel.”

“And yours?”

“Genevot.” She said it after another pause, during which she scrutinized his face, eyes narrowed as if seeking something.

“And you?” Said Laurent, turning his attention to the girl. Her eyes darted to Genevot before responding.

“Ange.”

“Ange,” Laurent repeated, “Genevot.” He inclined his head towards each of them in turn. “I came because I am leaving to ride to Karthas. I wanted to ask if there is anything I can do for you before I go.”

“Before you ride south with the Akielons, you mean.” Ange said it, staring stubbornly at the floor, lip jutting out. Laurent could see the anger in her trembling shoulders, in her white-knuckled fists.

“Yes.” Steadily, calmly.

She spun around, crossing her little arms. Genevot watched the exchange, eyes weary and hurting. She turned to Laurent.

“He recognized you.”

“So did you.”

“No,” she shook her head, and left the word hanging between them. They both understood it was not what she had meant.

Laurent released a breath, drawing closer. He stared down into the fire, side by side with the older woman. She had wrapped her hair in a white scarf, a symbol of mourning. Laurent wanted to ask how she knew Michel, what he had meant to her—but it felt acutely personal, a private piece of herself that she seemed uninclined to share.

“I fought at Marlas,” he said. Genevot nodded.

“Ange’s father died in that fight.”

“I know that feeling.”

“Yet you ride with them.”

“Yes.”

“Why—” she broke off, as if remembering to whom she was speaking. The fire in the grate snapped its jaws, sparks breaking free to die on the stone floor.

Laurent thought of Tarasis and Breteau; every gutted village, all the ashes scattered in the air. He thought of the pits full of bones on both sides of the shivering border. He thought of the summer flowers that bloomed where his brother had died, and the scars across Damen’s back.

“We’ve been killing each other for six years,” said Laurent. He met her eyes, gaze stripped back in its honesty. “For a long time, I wanted to think that it—mattered. That it was changing something. But I see now that it’s only been six years of dying.”

The white cloth was a simple approximation of the veils that the palace women had worn, when they returned from Marlas. It was the traditional garment: white for mourning, for life lost. Laurent remembered it, the color of fresh snow as they gathered, the men in matching jackets. For a week, the entire city had been washed in the color, clear and cold and unforgiving. And then, slowly, it bled away. The jackets and veils were replaced with vibrant counterparts, like the cold of winter that gives way to spring. Men were not meant to wear their mourning on their skin forever.

“When I am King,” Laurent said, “I want my people to live. To have a chance at it, at least.”

Genevot was frowning skeptically. “You are marching with an army,” she said.

Laurent’s answering smile was dry, a bit rueful. “Yes. I suppose it doesn’t make much sense, right now.”

“Akielons kill us.” This time it was Ange who spoke, the words coming out in a rush, as if welling up from her chest, “They always—it’s all they do. They always kill us.” There was a hardness in her voice that tried to be anger, but was edged with the sort of bleak hopelessness that betrayed fear.

“Ah, but they can’t kill me,” said Laurent. “I know magic.”

Ange frowned doubtfully. Laurent’s eyes sparked with mischief as he palmed a coin.

“Would you like me to teach you?”

***

In the field stretching out before Marlas, the joint armies were gathered, and all the adjuncts to an army, the outriders, the heralds, the supply wagons, the livestock, the physicians, and the aristocrats, including Vannes, Guion and his wife Loyse, who in a pitched battled would need to be separated, camped and made comfortable while the soldiers fought.

Starbursts and lions. They stretched out as far as the eye could see, so many banners aloft that they looked more like a fleet of ships than a marching column. Laurent looked out at the marshalling vista from his horse, and readied himself to take his place at its head.

His own head was still pounding, the sunlight painful as it struck his eyes. He saw Damen, also mounted, shoulders straight and powerful beneath his Akielon armor. His gaze was commanding, yet somehow warm, laced with sentiment, as if he knew and loved each man he led like a brother. It was the way Auguste had looked at his soldiers. The headache worsened, temples pulsing with pain.

Laurent’s force was smaller compared to Damen’s, blue outnumbered by red. It was impossible not to feel the unease, the incongruity of it like the prickling crawl of insects over skin. Laurent remembered all too well what had happened, the last time blue banners had been overrun by red on this land.

Among his men, he saw the faces of Jord, Rochert, Huet—men who had once fought with Auguste. That, too, was incongruent, a painful reminder of the past. Laurent breathed deeply, hoping to lessen the piercing in his skull with the fresh summer air. Yet the heat of the day had twined together the odor of the army—horse and man and sweat—with the sweet, blooming flowers, so that the air was cloying and muddled.

 _I will return here,_ thought Laurent, _and it will be Vere again._ Once, he had imagined it triumphant, a restoration of Delfeur to its former glory. Yet now, having walked the hollowed-out halls of Marlas—thinking of Genevot and Ange, unmoored, hovering between two worlds in that fort—he knew there had been a change too irrevocable to undo. Marlas would never be what it once was—nor would Delfeur. Nor, thought Laurent, would Vere. But for the first time, there came with that thought a spark of hope, like the first green bud that pokes through the melting snow.

Damen spurred his horse alongside Laurent’s as they took up positions, side by side. He was straight-backed in the saddle, arms and legs bare and glowing in the sun. There was no sign of doubt in the regal profile: his gaze turned itself to the horizon with the hunger of a man who will stop at nothing until he sees victory.

The horns blew. The trumpets trumpeted. The whole vista of the united armies began to move, two rivals riding together, blue alongside red.

***

The watchtowers were empty.

That’s what the scouts were shouting, when they came pounding back on lathered horses with their uneasy news. Damen shouted back. Everyone had to shout to be heard over the cacophony of sound: the wheels, the horses, the metallic tramp of armor, the rumble of earth, the ear-splitting blow of horns that was their army on the march. The column stretched from hilltop to horizon, a line of sectioned squares that moved over fields and hills. The whole army was poised to descend in attack on the watchtowers of Karthas.

But the watchtowers were empty.

“It’s a trap,” said Nikandros.

 _Yes,_ thought Laurent, but not in the way Nikandros meant it. He thought of his uncle, warned of their plan thanks to Akielon conventions of honor. He thought of what that extra time meant, what the Regent might do with all those hours to plan.

Damen ordered a small group to peel off from the main army and take the first tower. They watched from the hillside. The men cantered towards it, then dismounted, took up a wooden ram, and forced the door. The watchtower was a weird block shape against the horizon, with no activity in it; lifeless stone that should have habitation, and instead had none. Unlike a ruin, reclaimed by nature to form part of the landscape, the empty watchtower was incongruous, a signal of wrongness.

Laurent watched the men, small as ants, enter the watchtower without resistance. There was a strange, eerie silence of minutes in which nothing happened. Then the men came out, mounted, and trotted back to the group to report.

There were no traps. There were no defenses. There were no faulty floors to hurtle them downwards, no vats of heated oil, no hidden archers, no men with swords springing out from behind doors. It was simply empty.

The second tower was empty, and the third, and the fourth.

The realization that had unfolded in Laurent’s mind after they found that first tower emptied was only solidified as they drew closer to the fort itself, the lower walls of thick gray limestone, the fortifications above in mud brick. The low, two-story tower was tile-roofed, and built to house archers. But the narrow slits were dark and did not fire. There were no banners. There were no sounds.

Damen said, “It’s not a trap. It’s a retreat.” He was only half right.

“If it is, they were running from something,” said Nikandros. “Something that had them terrified.”

Damen case his gaze over the fort atop its rise, and then at the army stretching behind him, a mile of red alongside dangerous, glittering blue.

“Us,” said Damen.

They rode past the jagged rocks, up the steep knoll to the fort. They passed unimpeded through the open forecourt gateway, which itself was four short towers, looming above them in a silent cul-de-sac. The short towers were designed to rain down enfilading fire, trapping an army on their approach to the gate. They were still and quiet as Damen’s men applied the wooden ram, and broke open the great doors into the main fort.

Inside, the unnatural quality of their quiet increased, the columned atrium was deserted, the still water of the simple, elegant fountain no longer running. Laurent’s entire body sang with tension. _What was his uncle planning?_ It was a retreat, yes—but the Regent did not do anything without a reason.

Damen remained wary, warning the men against traps, and contaminated stores, and poisoned wells. They progressed systematically inward, through the empty public spaces, to the private residences of the fort.

Here the signs of retreat were more evident, furnishings disordered, contents hurriedly taken, a favorite hanging gone from the wall here while another remained there. Laurent could see in the disrupted living areas the final moments, the desperate war council, the decision to flee. Whoever had ordered it, the attack on the village had backfired. Instead of turning Damianos against his general, it had forged his army into a single powerful force and sent fear of his name sweeping across the countryside. Even so—Laurent could not shake the feeling that there had to be more behind the Regent’s decision not to fight.

“Here!” called a voice.

In the innermost part of the fort, they had found a barricaded door.

Damen signaled his men to caution. It was the first real sign of resistance, the possibility of danger imminent. Two dozen soldiers gathered, and Damen gave the nod, approving them to proceed. They took the wooden ram, and splintered the doors open.

It was a light, airy solar still adorned with its exquisite furnishings. From the elegant reclining couch with its scrolling carved base to the small bronze tables, it was intact.

And they all saw what was waiting for them in the empty fort of Karthas. No—not them. _Damen._

She sat on the reclining couch. Around her, she had seven women in attendance, two of them slaves, one an elderly maidservant, the others of good birth, part of her household. Her brows had risen at the crash as at some minor, distasteful breech of etiquette.

It seemed unusual, that she would be so far from the capital to give birth. Laurent wondered, briefly, if she had been behind the attack on the village—if it had been meant to stop or stall them. But he could not shake the feeling of his uncle’s touch that fell, even now, over the room. There was something more at play here, something behind even the machinations of the woman who gazed at them now.

She had given birth very recently, judging by the faint sepia smudges under her eyes. It would explain, too, why she had been left behind, too weak to travel while the others fled. It was impossible to know what had driven the women to stay with her—fierce loyalty, perhaps. Or perhaps the threat of a slit throat. Laurent would not put either option past her.

Her blonde hair fell in a coil over her shoulder, her lashes were pressed, her neck was as elegant as a column. She was a little pale, with slight creases on her forehead, which did nothing to harm its high, classical perfection, and seemed only to enhance her, like the finish on a vase.

She was beautiful. It was undeniable—Laurent catalogued the fact of it, tucking it away in his mind with all else that he understood was dangerous about her. He could see, from the serpentine coldness with which she watched them, that there was a mind behind those blue eyes that knew how to put beauty to use. She was calculating, deliberate, cool.

“Hello, Damen,” said Jokaste.

Laurent stood very still, several paces behind the soldiers, watching the scene unfold. For a moment, Damen did nothing but stare at her, as if committing every feature to memory. His eyes were an implacable storm, a churning sea of conflicting emotions. Laurent watched as he struggled to subdue it.

A moment passed, then two. Then, Damen turned to the low-level foot soldier to his right, as if delegating a trivial task that was beneath him, and meant nothing. Laurent was not fooled by the performance. Neither, he could see, was Jokaste.

“Take her away,” Damen said. “We have the fort.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more than halfway through! yay :)


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: references to past abuse + also just a lot of heavy feelings in this chapter!

Laurent had never been inside an Akielon fort. He was led to a set of rooms that appeared plain, at first, sparse in their simplicity. To his own eye, used to twining Veretian ornamentation, Karthas appeared harsh, the stone walls bleak and bare; a blunt tool, crafted only for utility, all beauty stripped away.

Yet as he examined the fixtures, Laurent found himself noticing the understated elegance of Akielon architecture. Where in Vere a stone wall might have been carved with patterns, painted over with murals or inlaid with colorful glass windows, in Akielos it was left blank—yet the blankness belied an incredible attention to detail in the way the stone was shorn down, smoothed until it felt almost soft against fingertips. Like polished metal, the walls of his rooms appeared to glow dimly in the torchlight.

Laurent stood at the window, running one thumb absently over the cloth bundle that contained Nicaise’s earring, tucked into the fold of his clothes. His mind was on Jokaste; on Damen’s face when he had seen Jokaste. The expression had been repressed, brought quickly under control, but still it replayed itself in Laurent’s mind—that flash of betrayal that cut deep, the edges of an old wound torn open.

Jokaste was a traitor. She had committed treason; the penalty would be death. But none of that was Laurent’s concern. She had already been confined to a cell, and was now Damen’s problem. Laurent knew it, as he knew that Damen would ensure that she was treated with nothing but the utmost respect, regardless of her crimes—regardless of whatever had passed between them. It was not in his nature to be cruel.

For Laurent, then, there was nothing to do but wait. He considered Jokaste, left behind—a loose thread. He tried to imagine his uncle’s mind, to determine what had forced his hand. It was possible that the evacuation of Karthas had been a simple mistake—that both Jokaste and the Regent had been blindsided when their attack on the Akielon village did not have its intended effect. But Laurent doubted it. His uncle planned for every contingency.

He did not have to wait long. It took only a few hours for the first alerts from the watchtowers to sound, the entire warning system flaring to life: horns in the inner towers sounding, men shouting orders, taking up positions on the battlements, streaming out to man the gates. Laurent could not keep his heart from pounding as he prepared himself for what would come next.

Meniados had fled. Damianos of Akielos had control of both this fort and of a powerful political prisoner in Jokaste. And he and his armies were on their way south.

The Regent’s heralds had come to Karthas.

***

Seating himself in the throne room, Laurent’s gaze was drawn to Damen. He knew what the Veretian party would see: a barbarian in savage splendor.

He knew, also, that this was intentional—Damen presenting himself purposefully as other, a brute and brutal force with which the Veretians, in their finely laced jackets, would have to contend. He sat on the throne in armor, his thighs and arms heavy with bared muscle. He watched with the sharp eyes of a predator as the Regent’s herald entered the hall.

Laurent sat beside him on an identical twin throne. He knew the picture they presented: royalty flanked by Akielon soldiers in warlike armor made for killing. The herald took in the bare stone hall of a provincial fort, bristling with the spears of soldiers, where the Akielon prince-killer sat beside the Veretian Prince on the dais, dressed in the same crude leather as his soldiers.

Laurent was the only Veretian in a hall filled with Akielons. He knew what his countrymen would see: all his uncle’s rumors made flesh. They would see a boy, foolish and petty, who had bent over for his brother’s killer. Laurent needed them to see it—to see him, united with Damianos of Akielos. His uncle’s men needed to understand that he would do anything—use any tool—to win this fight. They needed to see him cold-blooded, ruthless. Laurent needed—his uncle needed to understand that it w _as_ a fight. That Laurent was a threat, and not just a boy.

The Regent’s herald was accompanied by a party of six, four ceremonial guards and two Veretian dignitaries. Walking through a hall of armed Akielons had made them nervous, though they approached the thrones insolently, without bending a knee, the herald coming to a halt at the steps of the dais and arrogantly meeting Damen’s eyes.

Damen settled his full weight into the throne, sprawled on it comfortably, as if his body had been built for it. The soldiers around him tensed, glaring murderously at the insolence of the Regent’s herald as he refused to show any sign of deference to their King.

In the corner of his eye, Laurent saw the almost imperceptible twitch of Damen’s fingers. The soldiers around him shifted, as if their own movements were tethered inextricably to Damen’s, one cohesive unit.

Laurent recognized the herald—recognized the darker hair and complexion, his thickened eyebrows and the embroidered pattern on his laced jacket. Last time, Laurent had received the man in a flurry in a courtyard, breathless and pounding in on horseback, wheeling his mount to face his uncle’s herald down. Laurent remembered the man’s arrogance, his words, and the hessian sack pinned to his saddle. The earring burned like an ember, tucked against Laurent’s chest.

Now, the party of four guards and two officials came to a halt behind the herald. They stood, incongruent. There was a moment of silence in which the entire room held its breath.

“We accept the Regent’s surrender at Charcy,” said Damen.

The herald flushed. “The King of Vere sends a message.”

Again, there was that moment of disconcert as some tiny corner of Laurent’s heart jerked at the words _King of Vere,_ unable immediately to separate the title from his father. He reminded himself, forcefully, of whom the herald spoke.

“The King of Vere is seated beside us,” said Damen. “We do not recognize his uncle’s false claim to the throne.”

The herald was forced to pretend that those words had not been spoken. He turned from Damen to Laurent.

“Laurent of Vere. Your uncle extends his friendship to you in good faith. He offers you a chance to restore your good name.”

“No head in a bag?” said Laurent.

He kept his voice mild, body relaxed on the throne. One leg extended out in front of himself; a wrist draped elegantly on the wooden arm. His untroubled demeanor sang of the shift in power: he was no longer the rogue nephew, fighting alone on the border. He was a significant, newly established power, with lands and an army of his own.

“Your uncle is a good man. The Council has called for your death, but your uncle will not hear them. He will not accept the rumors that you have turned on your own people. He wants to give you the chance to prove yourself.”

Rumors _he_ had started—lies _he_ had spread. Laurent had no doubt that his uncle had seeded the idea that the Council should call for death, only to set himself up as a martyr, the suffering patriarch whose only concern was for his wayward nephew.

“Prove myself,” said Laurent.

The words were flat, but behind them came a surge of memory. So many times; so many little proofs. _You love me, don’t you? I’ve never asked you for anything, Laurent, and I’ve given so much…you can be good, can’t you?_

“A fair trial. Come to Ios. Stand before the Council and plead your case. And if you are found innocent, all that is yours will be returned to you.”

“‘All that is mine’,” Laurent echoed, tasting the edges of the words. There was something behind them—some layer he could not yet discern.

“Your Highness,” said one of the dignitaries, and Laurent recognized Estienne, a minor aristocrat who had made up part of his faction at court.

Estienne had the good manners to sweep off his hat. “Your uncle has been fair to all those who count themselves your supporters. He simply wants to welcome you back. I can assure you that this trial is only a formality to appease the Council.” Estienne spoke with his hat held earnestly in his hands. “Even if there have been some…minor indiscretions, you only need to show repentance and he will open his heart. He knows just as your supporters know that what they are saying about you in Ios is not…cannot be true. You are no traitor to Vere.”

 _A formality to appease the Council._ Estienne was right, although he did not understand the true nature of the situation. Laurent regarded him for only a moment before turning his attention back to the herald. “‘All that is mine will be returned to me’? Were those his words? Tell me his exact words.”

“If you come to Ios to stand trial,” said the herald, “all that is yours will be returned to you.”

Like a curtain thrown over a window, Laurent could make out the shape of concealment—yet he could not discern what meaning lay behind the words. It was important; he felt the weight of it. It would be the key to the Regent’s plan—if only he could decipher what his uncle was trying to say.

“And if I refuse?”

“If you refuse, you will be executed,” said the herald. “Your death will be a public traitor’s death, your body displayed on the city gates for all to see. What is left will receive no burial. You will not be entombed with your father and brother. Your name will be struck from the family register. Vere will not remember you, and all that is yours will be cast asunder. That is the King’s promise, and my message.”

 _That’s it, then._ The only ending that his uncle would accept.

Laurent knew—had always known—that he was never intended to win. He understood, even, that to lose would mean death.

Still, the hate of it took the breath from his lungs. _You will not be entombed with your father and brother._ As if it would not be enough to destroy only body; even name, even memory must be erased. It cut to the fear knotted in the deepest part of him—that even in death, he would be left without family. _You don’t want me to leave you alone, do you?_

For a moment, Laurent felt fifteen again. There was the same disorientation he had felt when faced suddenly, for the first time, with cold indifference, when before there had been—not _love_ , exactly, but an approximation of it. An imitation. The hands had not been kind, had not been gentle—but they had been warm. They had been there. They had been something to cling to.

The thought spilled out, desperately, from that childish part of himself: _I don’t understand what I did to make you hate me._

Next to him, Damen turned the full weight of his gaze onto the herald.

“Ride back to the Regent,” said Damen, “and tell him this. All that is rightfully Laurent’s will return to him when he is King. His uncle’s false promises do not tempt us. We are the Kings of Akielos and Vere. We will keep our state, and come to him in Ios when we ride in at the head of armies. He faces Vere and Akielos united. And he will fall to our might.”

The words grounded him, brought him back to his body. Laurent was stupidly, profoundly grateful. These exchanges had always been—he had always faced his uncle alone. No one had ever— _defended_ him, before.

“Your Highness,” said Estienne, his grip on the hat now anxious. “Please. You can’t side with this Akielon, not after everything that’s said about him, everything he’s done! The crimes he’s accused of in Ios are worse than your own.”

Laurent’s heart turned to ice, as he realized what was about to happen.

“And what is it I am accused of?” said Damen with utter scorn.

It was the herald who answered, in clear Akielon and a voice that carried to every corner of the hall.

“You are a patricide. You killed your own father, King Theomedes of Akielos.”

As the hall dissolved into chaos, Akielon voices shouting in fury, onlookers leaping up from their stools, Damen looked at the herald and said in a low voice, “Get him out of my sight.”

***

It had been four months after his fifteenth birthday. Laurent had spent the time unmoored, drifting through a court that had become unfamiliar, from which he had been isolated. With his uncle’s attentions stripped abruptly away, he had been left alone to face this new, strange world. Like a man thrown into the ocean, given only two options: learn to swim, or drown.

He had been learning. Though it was brutal, and cold, and he was alone—he had begun to understand what he must do and who he must become to survive.

And then his uncle brought a pet to court.

Laurent had never seen the Regent with a pet before. Throughout his entire childhood, he had thought his uncle eschewed the practice; it had not struck him as odd. Laurent’s father, after all, took no pets, having already a wife. And Auguste was intensely private, due perhaps to his preferences that lay outside the acceptable norms of the Veretian court. If Laurent had thought his uncle had some distasteful preference, he would have assumed it in line with Auguste’s—women over men. Yet he had never given the matter much thought; he was a boy, and he did not care. If he had, he might have thought to question why the Regent never took a wife.

So the initial reaction was confusion, a brief and violent moment of shock, when Laurent saw the boy sitting next to his uncle. He was unmistakably a child, younger than Laurent—eleven, perhaps, or twelve. His hair was the color of sand in sunlight, his face as pretty as a girl’s.

No one else seemed surprised. There were a few discreet glances, a few uncomfortably averted eyes. Yet it was only Laurent who stood, blinking dumbly, unable to understand who this boy was or what he was doing in a place of honor, at the Regent’s side.

And then Laurent noticed the jewels, glittering from around neck, and ears, and hair. He saw the paint, smeared across eyes, and cheeks, and lips. He saw the Regent’s hand, placed possessively on the boy’s shoulder, moving to stroke a lock of hair back from his forehead.

Laurent had turned, and left.

He’d escaped to the garden, weaving through bristling shrubs and blooming flowers. He collapsed on the small stone bench, tucked away in the greenery, hidden from all sides but one. His body was heaving, deep gasping breaths dragged into lungs as he fought against the nausea that crawled up his throat.

 _It’s unfair,_ he'd told himself, for he had done everything right—everything his uncle had asked—and yet he had been abandoned, left alone, used up and forgotten. He struggled, for a moment, to make himself believe that this was all it was: injustice that another boy should receive his uncle’s love. And indeed, there were traces of that fear, that question that lingered in the back of his mind: _what did I do wrong?_ What had he done, to become undeserving of love? Of family?

But he could not pretend it was indignance that turned his stomach. For his first thought, upon seeing the boy, upon realizing the situation, had not been for himself. It had not been for injustice; it had not been, even, a desire to take the boy’s place.

_You’re hurting him._

They were the first words that had sprung, unbidden, into Laurent’s mind. A truth so deeply buried that even now, to face it was agonizing, the emotion clawed and toothed as it devoured him. The first instinct had been disgust, a desire to—stop this. To tear the child away, to say _he’s just a boy_ —except that was why the child was there, wasn’t it? That was what Laurent had begun to realize, over the course of those four months, the reason behind his uncle’s sudden coldness—

It was as if he was being forced, piece by piece, to take apart his world and reorder it. Because if his uncle was hurting that boy

_he is—I know he is—I know that feeling, the hands the rings_

then that meant—it meant that—

_he hurt me._

The truth was an inescapable cage. It broke open inside him, twisting every piece of his body until Laurent felt himself re-formed in a new shape. Because if what his uncle did had been violence, had been hurt, then Laurent could no longer deny the truth that he had tried, desperately, to bury.

_He never loved me._

Alone, on that small stone bench, he had cried for the final death of his family.

Now, watching Damen thrust up from his throne and stride to one of the thick-glassed windows, that feeling came back to him. The world shifting, reordering itself. The hall emptied around them, until it was silent save for Damen’s ragged breaths. Laurent stood.

_You’re hurting him._

He felt his uncle’s hand in the room, in the rumors, in the lies. It seemed inherently wrong, as if some fundamental rule had been broken. For this game had always been private, somehow, a battle played out between only the Regent and Laurent.

Laurent was the target. Always, Laurent was the target. It was _his_ reputation dragged through the mud, _his_ name soured in his people’s mouths. Seven years, and always, it was only the two of them. He had grown almost—used to it. The way one accepts that summer will always bleed into winter, Laurent had swallowed the inevitability of it. After all, from the time of his brother’s death he had always known that he would never be—

_good enough_

—Auguste. That he would never be the King which, by right, Vere deserved. Some small, vulnerable part of him had felt the correctness of it, that he should struggle for a crown that was never meant to be his. Laurent had believed, down to his bones, this truth behind his uncle’s game: that he must prove himself.

But Damen—he didn’t deserve this. He was born to be King; made for it. He was good and honest and true; a man who sacrificed his own pride to help the lowest members of society; who out of honor would defend even his worst enemy; who possessed a body made for battle, and yet only enjoyed a fight when he could offer a hand to his opponent at the end of it, and help him stand.

Laurent felt the wrongness of it, that the Regent’s insidious web should be cast out further. It was the same feeling as when he had first seen that other boy, the same sickening shock of realization that his uncle could hurt other people. Could hurt those who did not deserve it, who had nothing to prove. Laurent felt the same desperate need to stop it, to push back the heavy, ringed hands that pulled the threads of others’ lives, a soulless puppeteer.

 _It must not continue._ The conviction was a stone, a physical weight in his chest.

Damen turned from the window, and their eyes met. Laurent could see the anger in the gaze, in the body, in the breathing. He could sense, also, some realization behind Damen’s eyes, as if they were seeing each other fully for the first time.

 _He is a good man._ To face this truth was like releasing a breath Laurent had not realized he was holding. _I don’t want him hurt—I don’t want my uncle to hurt him._ He detached mind from body, dizzy with the admission. It was the truth that had been growing, quietly, inevitably, until it crowded his chest and beat against his heart, until he could feel it like air in his lungs.

Damen said, in a steady, measured voice, “He thinks he can provoke me. He can’t. I am not going to act in anger or in haste. I am going to take back the provinces of Akielos one by one, and when I march into Ios, I will make him pay for what he has done.”

Laurent thought of Auguste, dead and buried and laid to rest. _The world cannot lose two suns._ There was only so much light that could bleed out of the earth before everything went dark.

“You can’t be considering his offer,” said Damen.

Laurent remained silent, bringing himself back to his body. Damen said, “You can’t go to Ios. Laurent, you won’t get a trial. He’ll kill you.”

“I’d get a trial,” said Laurent. “It’s what he wants. He wants me proven unfit. He wants the Council to ratify him as King so that he can rule with his claim wholly legitimized.”

“But—”

“I’d get a trial.” Laurent’s voice was quiet and steady, his mind turning over all the herald’s words. “He’d have a parade of witnesses, and each one would swear me a traitor. Laurent, the debauched shirker who sold his country to Akielos and spread his legs for the Akielon prince-killer. And when I had no reputation left, I’d be taken to the public square and killed in front of a crowd. I’m not considering his offer.”

There was still that small piece of him that whispered, hopefully, that he might yet prove himself, if only he was good enough. Deliberately, he crushed it. The time had come to accept that there would be no winning as long as he played his uncle’s games.

“Then what?”

“There’s something else,” said Laurent.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that my uncle doesn’t hold out a hand for someone to knock it aside. He sent that herald to us for a reason. There’s something else.” He tried, desperately, to make sense of it—to discern what secret trap his uncle had set. “There’s always something else.”

There was a sound from the doorway. Damen turned. Laurent did not. He listened; he heard the voice of Pallas.

“It’s the Lady Jokaste,” said Pallas. “She’s asking to see you.”

***

Across Damen’s face ran a series of emotions—shock, fury, sorrow, confusion—each more painful than the last. His hands trembled slightly, his chest rose and fell rapidly with shallow breaths. He looked like a man preparing himself for a blow, body tensed in anticipation of the pain.

 _He loved her._ Laurent had already known it. Yet it was different, seeing the effects of that feeling scrawled now across Damen’s face; understanding the depth of the betrayal.

Damen looked over at Laurent and said, flatly, “Deal with it.”

For a moment, Laurent continued to gaze at him. _Does he love her still?_ There was a small silence; then he nodded wordlessly, and followed Pallas out of the room.

They navigated hallways broad and narrow until they reached a set of worn stone steps. Laurent followed Pallas down into the belly of the fort. There was a grated door, through which they passed.

The prison cells at Karthas were dank, cramped, and underground, as though Meniados of Sicyon had never anticipated having political prisoners, which was probably the case. Laurent felt the temperature drop; it was cooler here, in the hewn stone under the fort. After passing that first door, the guards came to attention. They moved into a corridor with uneven stone flooring. The second door had a section of tight grating through which one could glimpse the interior of the cell.

Pallas opened the door, and Laurent stepped through. Behind him, he heard the door shut. He was left alone with Jokaste.

She was reclined on an exquisitely carved seat. Her cell was clean and well furnished, with tapestries and cushions that had been transferred from her solar, as if she were a guest and not a prisoner. Damen was inordinately kind, as Laurent had known he would be.

Laurent moved to stand in front of her. For a moment, they were silent, studying each other. Her hair was twisted up and held in place by a single pearl pin, a gold crown of polished curls atop her long, balanced neck. She sat on the low reclining seat, her posture regal, as if it were a throne. The simple white sheaf of her gown, gathered at each shoulder, was covered by an embroidered silk shawl of royal vermillion, which someone had allowed her to retain. Under her arched golden brows, her eyes were the color of woad.

“You called for Damianos,” Laurent said, after a pause. She remained silent, eyes emotionless, regarding him with cool, intellectual detachment. There was another pause.

“He’s not coming,” said Laurent.

Her face remained expressionless, but he watched her absorb the words. He could see the mind working behind the eyes, thoughts sparked and flickering. It was uncomfortably familiar.

When she spoke, it was in pure, accentless Veretian. “Damianos has sent me his bed boy. Blond, blue-eyed, and all laced up like a virgo intacta. You’re just his type.”

Laurent said, “You know who I am.”

“The prince du jour,” said Jokaste.

Another pause.

Laurent could see what she intended. It was, disconcertingly, exactly what he would do if he found himself in her position. He arranged himself against the wall, settling in for the battle.

Laurent said, “If you’re asking, did I fuck him, the answer is, yes.”

“I think we both know you weren’t the one fucking him. You were on your back with your legs in the air. He hasn’t changed that much.”

Jokaste’s voice was as refined as her poise, as if the practice of high manners was not disturbed by either Laurent’s words or her own. Jokaste said, “The question is how much you liked it.”

It was, honestly, a bit disappointing. Laurent had expected a more difficult opponent. Seeking weakness, she had landed on the most predictable refrain.

“I see. We are going to trade stories? Shall I tell you my preferred position?”

“I imagine it’s similar to mine.”

“Confined?” Laurent said it without missing a beat.

It was her turn to pause. She used the time to peruse his features, as if sampling the quality of silk. Laurent stared back without a hint of trepidation, utterly at ease. Jokaste looked at him as she might regard a dog who has just revealed that it knows a trick—sit, roll over. Fetch.

She said, “Are you asking what it was like?”

Laurent remained silent, leisurely boredom fixed across his face. He could feel Jokaste’s searching for cracks, for bruises, for any signs of weakness.

“Laurent of Vere. They say you’re frigid. They say you rebuff all your suitors, that no man has been good enough to prise your legs apart. I believe you thought it would be brutish and physical, and maybe a part of you even wanted it that way. But you and I both know that Damen does not make love like that. He took you slowly. He kissed you until you started to want it.”

Laurent said, “Don’t stop on my account.”

“You let him undress you. You let him put his hands on you. They say you hate Akielons, but you let one into your bed. You weren’t expecting what it felt like when he touched you. You weren’t expecting the weight of his body, how it felt to have his attention, to have him want you.”

“You left out the part near the end, when it was so good I let myself forget what he’d done.”

 _You can’t hurt me with this. Not anymore than I’ve hurt myself._ The words were a knife, handed to an enemy as though to prove the strength of his own armor.

“Oh dear,” said Jokaste. “That was the truth.”

Another pause. He could feel her grasping, searching for something that would stick.

“It’s heady, isn’t it?” said Jokaste. “He was born to be a king. He’s not a stand-in, or a second choice, like you are. He rules men just by breathing. When he walks into a room, he commands it. People love him. Like they loved your brother.”

Laurent would not give it to her. “My dead brother,” he offered helpfully. “Shall we now do the part where I spread for my brother’s killer? You can describe it again.”

He kept his voice easy, shoulders leaned casually against the stone wall of the cell.

She said, “Is it difficult to ride with a man who is more of a king than you are?”

“I wouldn’t let Kastor hear you call him a king.”

“Or is that what you like about it? That Damen is what you’ll never be. That he has surety, self-belief, strength of conviction. Those are things that you yearn for. When he focuses it all on you, it makes you feel like you can do anything.”

The realization was an icy caress, cold fingers on the back of his neck. _She loves him._

Laurent said, “Now we are both telling the truth.”

She could see her mistake—the guard she had dropped, the private truth exposed. Her eyes hardened. They gazed at each other.

“Meniados is not going to defect from Kastor to Damianos,” said Jokaste.

“Why not?” said Laurent.

“Because when Meniados fled Karthas, I encouraged him to head straight to Kastor, who will kill him for leaving me alone here.”

Laurent filed this information away, but offered no response.

Jokaste said, “We now have dispensed with pleasantries. I am in possession of certain information. You will offer me clemency in exchange for what I know. There will be a series of negotiations, then, when we have decided on a mutually beneficial arrangement, I will return to Kastor in Ios. After all,” said Jokaste, “that is why Damianos sent you here.”

She thought she knew him. That she understood Damen better than anyone—better even than he knew himself. _He hasn’t changed that much,_ she had said, and Laurent felt his heart kick in his chest. He was not sure, entirely, how to process the possessive instinct, the thought that rose unbidden in his mind: _You don’t know him anymore._

He spoke slowly, without particular urgency. “No. He sent me to tell you that you’re not important. You’ll be held here until he’s crowned in Ios, then you will be executed for treason. He’s never going to see you again.”

Laurent pushed himself off the wall.

“But thank you,” he said, “for the information about Meniados. That was helpful.”

He had almost reached the door before she spoke.

“You haven’t asked me about my son.”

Laurent stopped. Here, then, was her final play. He turned.

Enthroned on the reclining couch, she was regal, like a queen in a sculpted marble frieze commanding the length of a room.

“He came early. It was a long birth, through the night into the morning. At the end of it all, a child. I was looking into his eyes when we got word of Damen’s soldiers marching on the fort. I had to send him away, for safety. It’s a terrible thing to separate a mother from her child.”

“Really, is this all?” said Laurent. “A few pinpricks, and the desperate appeal of motherhood? I thought you were an opponent. Did you really think a prince of Vere would be moved by the fate of a bastard’s child?”

“You should be,” said Jokaste. “He is the son of a king.”

The son of a king.

Laurent felt a cold weight settle in the pit of his stomach. She delivered the words calmly, as she had delivered every remark, except that these words changed everything. The idea that it might be—that it was—

Damen’s chid.

Everything resolved into a pattern: that the child had come so early; that she had traveled so far into the north to deliver it, to a place where the date of the child’s birth could be obscured; that she had kept the fact of her pregnancy secret until after Kastor’s ascension; that the Regent had allowed her to be left, alone, at Karthas.

The child was his contingency; the secret trap that Laurent had been unable, earlier, to discern. He felt as if he had been struck, unable to control his body’s reaction as the sheer horror of it washed over him.

Jokaste was staring back at him like she knew, like she understood. The child, wrapped in his uncle’s webbing, those fingers like poisonous roots that would deepen and infect the boy’s life. Of course, the Regent would not touch him—not for the first handful of years. But Laurent knew, more than anyone, that his uncle did not need to touch to hurt.

“You have sent Damianos’ son to my uncle.” The words were ripped, painfully, from his throat.

She said, “You see? I am an opponent. I will not be left in a cell to rot. You will tell Damen that I will see him as I require, and I think you will find that he will not send in a bed boy this time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know the difference between blonde and blond and at this point i'm too scared to ask


	12. Chapter Twelve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: vague references to past abuse and also ~the sex scene~ so read at ur own risk 
> 
> happy valentine's day ;)

Laurent moved as if in a dream, half outside himself. He processed, vaguely, as he turned, the sight of Damen, staring through the grating of the outer door. He had the expression of a man who has just been run through with a sword.

Laurent watched him turn, watched him leave. After a moment, he followed, hardly feeling the movement of his limbs as he left the cells at Karthas behind him. He spoke to Pallas, disseminated orders that the King was to remain undisturbed, all petitioners turned away from Damianos’ chambers. He met with Vannes and Nikandros and a few select advisors, explained the situation as briefly and emotionlessly as possible. He remained calm, collected, stoic; the picture of regal poise.

All the while, he was thinking: _I am going to die._

It was as if—even as he gave orders, even as he moved and spoke and commanded without faltering—all but that piece of his mind needed to perform these tasks had detached itself, and was now orbiting around this single truth, the gravity of which was too powerful to escape.

_I am going to die._

There was a strange sense of calm about it. Like the sea, gone still and cold after a storm. Laurent wondered if this was how Auguste had felt when he saw that steel shearing towards his neck.

He saw, as a man seated at a chessboard might, every move his uncle had made to reach this point. He saw, also, every move he might make in return, every play still available. He saw that none of it mattered, for he could not allow his uncle to keep the child. Whatever this thing was between them—a game, a war—it must end somewhere.

In the moments after Jokaste’s pronouncement, everything had fallen into place in Laurent’s mind. The Regent would keep the child as leverage, knowing that Damen would never wage open war with the threat that harm might come to the boy. It did not matter whether the child was really his—if there was even the most remote possibility, he would tear himself apart to protect it. And without Damen and his forces, the Regent would never be defeated. He would remain, comfortably, like a growing sickness in Ios, eating apart two kingdoms from the inside out. They would continue their stalemate across fractured and fracturing cities, and the child would grow older under the Regent’s hand. All the while, people would suffer.

Damen would suffer.

Laurent had seen it in his face through that grate. He knew exactly how it felt to be denied family, how it gutted you and hollowed you out. Laurent had seen, in those moments, in those cells, how it would be: his uncle’s poisonous touch would spread across the continent, infecting everyone and everything, until even Damen had wasted away, tortured with nightmare visions of a growing child he would never meet.

So Laurent could not allow his uncle to keep the boy. If it was a choice between accepting the blade at his neck or turning it against the whole world, then it was really no choice at all.

Once he had allowed himself to realize it, the answer seemed quite simple. The Regent would never trade such a useful pawn as the child for Jokaste; it would have to be Laurent. It had always, after all, been Laurent. Like a rabbit caught in a trap, the question of death had only been a question of when—not how. Part of him, he knew, had already realized it would come at the Regent’s hand. For hadn’t his uncle been killing him, since that first night at Chastillon? Hadn’t it always been only a slow death?

It was almost a relief to accept it. He had struggled, uselessly, for so long—had prolonged the game, certainly, had checked his uncle, forced his hand. Laurent had not made it easy, and he took pride in that. He had even helped to ensure his uncle’s eventual demise; for he had no doubt that Damianos of Akielos would destroy the Regent, one way or another. Laurent had hoped that he might live to witness it, but he could see now how that would be impossible. It did not matter—he had learned long ago how to smother hope.

When he had finished with meetings and concluded all immediate duties, Laurent allowed himself a moment to breathe. He stood at the overlook of a jutting stone balcony, watching the horizon swallow the bloated body of the sun. His own death, he knew, lay on that horizon. He could see it taking form, growing clearer—closer. He took a breath, and the air was heavy and sweet with summer.

He was not dead yet, and there was work to do. Laurent turned his back on the sun’s final breaths and made his way back into the fort.

***

When he entered the room, Damen looked up. Laurent closed the door behind him without turning, without breaking the embrace of their eyes. Damen looked—lost. Like a man afloat at sea, trying desperately not to drown. Laurent recognized that feeling.

As he stepped forward, Damen drew an unsteady breath, gathering himself as a man might take up his shield before marching to battle. It was painful to watch.

Laurent said, “No. I’m not here to—” he stopped. He was not sure, entirely, what his presence meant to Damen. He was aware of every barrier he had placed between them, every wall he had agonizingly constructed. He said, “I’m just here.”

There was a shift in Damen’s features—shield discarded—as they softened back into pain, with a sort of hopeless gratitude beneath that Laurent could not entirely place. His lips parted, as if to speak, and Laurent felt himself moving forward, drawn by the promise of words, by the tilt of chin, by the beautiful, wretched eyes.

Laurent moved towards him because he found, in this moment, that he could no longer stay away. He did not try to stop his body as it placed fingers against Damen’s neck, only stood still as he drew the other man forward. It was awkward; stiff; unfamiliar. It did not matter. A thousand armies could not tear Laurent away as body leaned into body. He could feel Damen’s pulse beneath the fragile skin of his neck.

Time passed. He could feel the change in the air, the warmth bleeding into the space between them. The weight of sorrow receded, replaced with a new sort of tension.

“Now you are taking advantage of my kind-hearted instincts,” Laurent said, murmuring the words into Damen’s ear.

Damen drew back, but didn’t move away completely, and Laurent was glad for it. The bedding shifted as he sat down, as if it was natural for them to be sitting with their shoulders almost touching on another.

Damen’s lips curled into a fragile half-smile. “You aren’t going to offer me one of your gaudy Veretian handkerchiefs?”

“You could use the clothing you’re wearing. It’s about the same size.”

“Your poor Veretian sensibilities. All those wrists and ankles.”

“And arms and thighs and every other part.”

“My father’s dead.”

The words had a finality to them. Damen spoke as if it were an end in and of itself to say it aloud, the vulnerable truth laid to rest. He looked up at Laurent.

“You thought he was a warmonger. An aggressive, war-hungry king, who invaded your country on the flimsiest of pretexts, hungry for land and the glory of Akielos.”

“No,” said Laurent. “We don’t have to do this now.”

“A barbarian,” said Damen, “with barbaric ambitions, fit only to rule by the sword. You hated him.”

The truth was too close between them. Laurent felt himself swallowed by it.

“I hated you,” he said. “I hated you so badly I thought I’d choke on it. If my uncle hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed you. And then you saved my life, and every time I needed you, you were there, and I hated you for that, too.”

“I killed your brother.”

It was everything—every wound between them, exposed. Laurent felt it, felt the pain of all of it—felt that it was not enough to stop the truth, even now, that grew in his chest, until it seemed his lungs might burst with it.

“What are you doing here?” Damen said.

In the moonlight, he did not look entirely real, set against the dim shadows of the room that shrouded them both.

Laurent said, “I know what it’s like to lose family.”

The room was very quiet, with no hint of the activity that must be taking place beyond its walls, even this late. A fort was never silent, there were always soldiers, attendants, slaves. Outside, the guards were making their evening rounds. The sentries on the walls were patrolling, looking out into the night.

“Is there no way forward for us?” said Damen. The words were a knife, twisting everything together inside Laurent. _I already know the way forward,_ he thought, _and I know what lies at the end of it, for me._

He said, “You mean, will I come back to your bed for the little time we have left?”

“I mean that we hold the center. We hold everything from Acquitart to Sicyon. Can we not call it a kingdom and rule it together? Am I such a poorer prospect than a Patran princess, or a daughter of the Empire?”

Laurent released a breath. He felt himself on the edge of a precipice, a decision that he knew, inexorably, would be his downfall. He desperately wanted to say yes. To release himself, to close his eyes and give his body away to wind and exhilaration. And yet he held back, frozen with the fear of drawing closer. He thought of his uncle. He thought of every time that closeness had been nothing more than a weapon used to strike where it might hurt most.

Damen turned to look at him, and Laurent realized that he had been silent for some time. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet, entire body weak with wanting.

“How can you trust me, after what your own brother did to you?” It was something they shared; this knowledge of how family could wound. How intimacy could turn violent. Laurent did not understand how Damen could—overlook this. How he could tear himself open, again and again, as if he did not feel the pain of it.

“Because he was false,” said Damen, “and you are true. I have never known a truer man.” He said, into the stillness, “I think if I gave you my heart, you would treat it tenderly.”

It hurt. More than anything, it hurt. When Laurent had imagined his future, it had been always at the end of a sword; a future in which he destroyed Damianos of Akielos; a future in which he destroyed his uncle; always, he was living for a knife and the promise of revenge. It was not so difficult to forfeit a future bathed in blood.

But he had never imagined this. A future that ended not in violence, but in another’s arms. The tender, aching fragility of the picture was almost more than Laurent could bear. It was cruel, though Damen did not mean it to be. For if Laurent were to accept it—to have this, to hold it, to cradle it and nurture it and watch it bloom, only to know how soon it would wither—well. He could live with death. But he was not entirely sure he could survive the destruction of that incandescent future.

He turned his head, unable to hold Damen’s gaze. Laurent tried, desperately to reorder his thoughts; they slipped from his fingers, running dizzy with desire: _I want it—this future, your heart. If I had it, I would never release it; I would cradle it, I would eat it, I want it, I want it, I would never let anything hurt you. I want you._

It was impossible. Unable to say anything else, he said, “When you make love to me like that, I can’t think.”

“Don’t think,” said Damen.

Laurent felt as if his soul, the very core of his being, was being torn in two. And still, he wanted it.

Damen said, “Don’t think.”

“Don’t,” Laurent forced the words out, “toy with me. I—have not the means to—defend against this.”

“I don’t toy with you.”

“I—”

“Don’t think,” said Damen, and Laurent could not bring himself to fight it any longer.

“Kiss me,” he said. He felt himself flush, heat creeping unbidden into his face. He could not stop the part of himself that rebelled, that cringed away, that tried desperately to hold together the torn-open mess of his heart, exposed on the bed between them.

The words hung awkwardly, a blurt, but Laurent didn’t take them back, he just waited, his body singing with tension.

Instead of leaning in, Damen took Laurent’s hand, brought it towards himself, and kissed his palm, once.

It was so gentle, so sweet, that Laurent felt as if he might die. He was a man in freefall, spinning dizzy through the air, unable to control his motion, unsure of where he might land. Knowing only that it would end in death. He didn’t know what to do. “I meant—”

“Don’t let you think?”

Laurent didn’t answer. Damen waited, in the quiet.

“I’m not—” said Laurent. And then, as the moment stretched out between them, “I’m not an innocent who needs his hand held through every step.”

“Aren’t you?”

Damen said the words as if he was realizing something. Laurent knew, then, that he was lost to it, that he could not turn back even if he wanted to. He remembered their night at Ravenel, the coaxing, gentle hands, the way Damen had insisted, infuriatingly, on ensuring Laurent was ready—on forcing Laurent to admit all he wanted to them both.

After a moment, he made himself speak. “At Ravenel, I—it had been a long time since I had—with anyone. I was nervous.”

“I know,” said Damen.

“There has,” said Laurent. He stopped. It was like pulling back the edges of a bandage, to reveal the outline of a rancid, festering wound. “There has only been one other person.”

“I’m a little more experienced than that.” Damen said it softly, voice pitched low.

“Yes, that is immediately apparent.”

“It is?” A little pleased.

“Yes.”

He could feel Damen looking at him, studying him. Trying to understand the tension that lay like a wall between them. Yet Laurent could not bring himself to peel back that bandage entirely, terrified of what might happen if Damen were to see the full extent of the decay. He felt the shame of it, a heavy lump in his throat, felt the crawling touch of his uncle like mottled bruises across his entire body. He could not make himself speak.

After a moment, Damen said, softly, “Laurent, I’d never hurt you.”

Laurent’s mouth moved, releasing a strange, disbelieving breath as the words sat, incongruous, between them. And yet—he believed it. He could not force himself to stop believing it, impossible as it was.

“I know,” said Damen, “that I did hurt you.”

Laurent remained carefully motionless, not trusting his body—even the slightest shift, and it might shatter, or crumble to dust. Surely the body was not made for such f _eeling,_ for feeling that raged like a wild boar and tore at his neck like a wolf after blood. It took all Laurent’s effort to control his breathing.

“I hurt you, Laurent.”

He found his voice, said, “That’s enough, stop.”

“It wasn’t right. You were just a boy. You didn’t deserve what happened to you.”

“I said that’s _enough_.”

“Is it so hard to hear?”

 _Yes._ Laurent was not sure how much more he could take. The words—it was everything. Everything he had wanted, desperately, for someone to say to him since that jaw-breaking moment in the tent at Marlas. Since that first night at Chastillon. Since every night after that. _You didn’t deserve what happened to you._

Damen allowed him the space of the silence. They sat, quietly, for a few moments as Laurent battled the storm inside his chest. When Damen spoke again, his voice was careful, a respite, an offering.

“My first time, there was a lot of rolling around. I was eager and had no idea what to do. It’s not like Vere, we don’t watch people doing it in public.” He said, “I still get too caught up near the end. I know I forget myself.”

A silence. It went on too long, yet Laurent could not bring himself to break it. He knew what Damen was doing—understood all the little vulnerabilities, the pieces laid bare. _I think if I gave you my heart, you would treat it tenderly._ And here it was: bit by bit, surrendered without a fight.

“When you kissed me,” said Laurent, pushing the words out, “I liked it. When you took me in your mouth, it was the first time that I had…done that.” He said, “I liked it when you—”

Damen pushed himself up, and Laurent’s breathing shallowed.

He had kissed Damen before, but not like this. Not with the truth a broken shell between them, all the awful guts spilled out over the ground. Not with the dead buried, the bones laid to rest, the wounds revealed and stitched back together.

The inches of air between them were nothing, and everything. Laurent had never wanted anything like he had wanted this. He felt remade with it, the proportions of his body restructured to hold it. The promise of the moment was so vivid that it felt almost as if it were already happening.

Damen lifted his hand, slide his fingers into the short, soft hair at the back of Laurent’s neck, cupping his head. They had never been this close, not with the fact of who Damen was open between them.

Laurent felt as if he might break.

“I’m not your slave,” said Damen. “I’m a man.”

Even this—even this, Laurent would be forced to admit. There was a question behind the words, a note of desperation that felt almost like begging. As if Damen were saying, _take me for who I am._

“It’s me,” said Damen. “It’s me, here with you. Say my name.”

If that was the price—Laurent would pay it. He would carve out his heart and swallow it, just to sate the flame of desire that burned its way through his veins.

“Damianos.”

The name was an admission, a statement of the one truth he had thought himself unable to live with—a truth that broke him open, left him exposed. He felt all the sharp edges of it, all the vulnerable softness.

His entire body shuddered against Damen as they kissed, unable to process the agonizing, radiant blaze of feeling. Tangled up in the moment, he could not bring himself to care whether it was some self-destructive impulse; he was not strong enough to give it up. He would die a thousand times, for this. It was, perhaps, the only real thing worth dying for.

Damen pushed him down onto the bed, pushed himself on top, and Laurent’s fingers curled tight into his hair, though fully clothed they could do no more than kiss. It was a closeness that wasn’t enough, limbs tangling. Damen’s hands slid impotently down Laurent’s tight-laced clothing. The touch sent every nerve in his body alight, and he kissed Damen as if it were breathing, as if he would suffocate without it.

All the desire was subsumed, concentrated into the act of kissing. Laurent shuddered, entire body shaking as every barrier, every wall crumbled, brought down by the force of all that was exchanged between them.

_Prince-killer. Damianos. Damen._

A slide and a push and Laurent was on top, looking down. Beneath him, Damen lay panting, pupils large in the dim light. For a moment they just gazed at each other. Damen stared at him as if he were the entire sky, all the stars and the moon and the sun beating in his chest like a heart. Laurent felt the pull of that gaze, and knew that he had never stood a chance.

He took hold of the gold lion pin at Damen’s shoulder, and with a sharp tug he cast it off. It skittered over the marble floor to the far right of the bed.

Cloth unwound itself, slipped from its moorings. Damen’s clothing fell away from him, revealing his body to Laurent’s gaze.

“I—” Damen pushed himself up instinctively onto one arm, and Laurent leveled a look sharp enough to stop him halfway. The moonlight slid like water over Damen’s chest as it rose and fell.

Laurent lifted his hands to his own neck. He kept his eyes on Damen’s as, slowly, he took up one of the tight-laced ties at his throat, and drew on it.

There was an unmistakable pulse of desire behind Damen’s eyes. They followed the path of the laces as, slowly, deliberately, Laurent undressed for him, one lace after another, the jacket’s fabric opening, revealing the fine white shirt beneath.

His own belly was a coiled mess of heat, heart frantic behind his ribs. The jacket came first, dropping from his body like armor. Damen’s gaze splayed out over him, catching at his shoulder, where, Laurent knew, a new scar had taken shape. Laurent watched the roaming eyes, for a moment. Then, in one smooth motion, he reached behind himself and drew the shirt off.

He thought of all the times that Damen’s hands had done this for him, the meticulous coaxing of clothing apart from itself, the halting removal of layers. Now, in this moment, his skin was an offering, an admission, a question. Their eyes met, and Laurent could see the same understanding in Damen’s eyes; it was more than body exposed between them.

Laurent said, “I know who you are. I know who you are. Damianos.”

“Laurent,” said Damen, and sat up then, as if he couldn’t help it, his hands riding up the fabric over Laurent’s thighs to clasp his unclothed waist. Skin touched skin. Laurent felt as if he were on fire, and still, he wanted more.

He slid a little, straddling Damen’s lap, his thighs opening. He put his hand on the plane of Damen’s chest, on the scar at his shoulder, a mirror of his own. He knew, from the recounting he had heard of the battle, that it was the last thing Auguste had done before Damen had killed him. In the dim light, Auguste was between them, sharp as a knife.

The kiss was like a wound, as if to do it Laurent was impaling himself on that knife. He could taste his own desperation, edged and needy, his fingers clutching, his body unsteady.

Damen groaned from someplace deep in his chest, his thumbs pressing hard into Laurent’s flesh. He kissed back with the same pain, the same edges. There was a desperation in both of them, an aching need that could not be filled, as if their bodies were connected at the heart, joined in the same unconscious striving.

Laurent had known, when he entered the room, that he was a man at the edge of a cliff. Now—he felt himself falling and urged his body on, as if to fall faster would be a gift, as if he could not wait for the impact that would shatter him completely. The sounds Damen was making beneath him, the urgent kisses that strove for closeness, Laurent’s boots pulled off, the thin silk of his courtier’s clothes peeled down.

“Do it.” Laurent turned in his arms, presenting himself as he had on their first night together, offering his body, every piece of himself surrendered. “Do it. I want it. I want—”

Damen pressed forward, the full weight of him an unrelenting pressure as he ran a hand up Laurent’s back, slowly rubbing himself, close to his object, in a sweet, simulated fuck. Laurent arched his back, lost to the sensation of it.

“We can’t, we don’t have—”

“I don’t care,” Laurent said.

He shuddered, and his body gave a jerk that was an unmistakable fuck backwards. For a moment both their bodies were operating somewhat on instinct, pushing together.

Frustration built. Physicality was an obstacle to desire, and Damen groaned into his neck, hands sliding down over his body. Laurent could feel the tension in his arms, the desperate touch, and was unable to do anything but lose himself in the desire, the urge for _more_ , for _closer._

He wanted Damen inside. He wanted to—give this, to accept this, a promise played out across bodies. He wanted, more than anything, to let Damen in, to feel the full weight of him, of everything he was.

Damen slid his hands up Laurent’s thighs, pushing them apart a little. Laurent felt that he might lose his mind entirely.

“Do it, I told you, I don’t care—”

A smash, the unlit oil burner hitting the marble and shattering in the dim room, Damen’s fingers clumsy. He pressed with his oiled fingers first. It was inelegant; Laurent felt the body braced over his back as Damen guided himself with one hand. It wouldn’t, quite.

“Let me in,” said Damen, voice curling around Laurent’s ear, his throat. “Let me inside you.”

Laurent could feel the sting of it, the stretch. Damen pushed, slowly. He felt every inch, as the room faded into sensation. There was only the feel of it, the slide of Damen’s chest against his back, the arms that curled around his body, fingers gentle, a touch that left Laurent’s skin singing.

Behind him, Damen was panting. Laurent was pushed forward under the weight, body braced against his elbows. Damen dropped his forehead to Laurent’s neck, the sweat-dampened curls spidering across his shoulder, the shivering feel of it running down his spine.

Damen was inside him. It felt raw and unprotected. Laurent felt the full weight of it, the honesty of it, the inescapable pressure. Damen moved, and Laurent could not stop the sound that tore from his throat, gasping _yes_ into the bedding.

Damen’s grip tightened in helpless reflex, his forehead bent to Laurent’s neck, fitting them together. Laurent wanted nothing but _closer,_ wanted every point of contact, wanted nothing between them, not even air.

As if responding unconsciously to Laurent’s desire, Damen slid an arm around his chest, thigh fit against thigh. The shock of Damen’s grip, still oiled, between his thighs sent heat searing dizzy through Laurent as his body responded, moving, finding its own pleasure. They were moving together.

It was good. It was so good, and he was lost to it, drowning in it, wanting never to escape from it. He could hear Damen’s voice, broken Akielon in his ear, every word its own flickering ember of desire.

“I want you,” said Damen, “I’ve wanted you for so long, I’ve never felt like this with anyone—”

“Damen,” said Laurent, helplessly, “Damen.”

He could feel this thing, building, between them; more than body, more than heart, something that Laurent knew he would never escape. There was a moment of confusion as Damen broke away, but it was only to press him onto his back, the sundering brief as Damen’s mouth pressed down onto his, as Laurent took hold of his neck and tugged him in. Damen’s weight bore down on him, shuddering heat as he entered again with a strong, slow push.

And Laurent felt his body open for it, a single, perfect slide, as if they were made to fit together this way. Damen took up the same, insistent rhythm, their bodies tangled and a harder, continuous fucking. They were caught in each other, and when their eyes met Laurent said, “ _Damen,_ ” again, like it meant everything—and in that moment, it did. The pressure peaked, hitting that one spot— _there, there—_ and Laurent was shuddering, pulsing against the air.

Strident as proof, Laurent came with Damen inside him, Damen’s name on his lips, and Damen cried out, his whole body shaking, the first deep pulse of his own climax spilling heat, and Laurent was lost to it, overwhelmed in their shared pleasure, in every connection left unbroken between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! just popping in to say thanks again for ur patience--I'm a full-time student + I'm working 3 jobs, which all adds up to about 60-65 hours a week so I don't have much time for writing. But!! only seven more chapters to go! getting close :)


	13. Chapter Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: vague references to child abuse

Laurent slept, and it was dreamless; dark and warm, as if he were inside the belly of the world. When he woke, it was to the softest touch, drawing consciousness back to the surface of his mind so that he became aware of the smooth tangle of silk around his waist, of the muted light that played across the backs of his eyelids. He opened his eyes.

“Damen,” said Laurent. For a moment, it felt as if he had woken into a dream. As if now, here, in the dappled sunlight, he was still caught, somehow, in the tendrils of sleep. His heart kicked with such force in his chest that it did not feel entirely real. 

“Laurent,” said Damen.

They were gazing at each other. Damen’s eyes swallowed the light and set it dancing in new colors. Laurent reached out to trace a touch down over Damen’s body, sleep dripping slow as honey from his mind, the sweetness of it on the back of his tongue. His fingers met warm skin, solid, impossibly real. The sensation of it was a tether; he was not dreaming. This confirmation sent a new pulse of joy twisting through his body.

“What?” Damen was smiling.

Laurent flushed. He had been staring at his own fingers as they moved across Damen’s skin. “You’re very,” he said, cheeks alive with heat, “attractive.”

“Really,” said Damen, in a rich, warm voice.

“Yes,” said Laurent.

Damen’s smile widened, and he lay back in the sheets looking ridiculously pleased with himself. It was absurd. Laurent’s heart felt swollen, as if it might burst.

“Well,” Damen owned, turning his head back to Laurent eventually, “You are too.”

Laurent dropped his head slightly, laughter creeping into his throat. He could hear the bemused fondness in his voice as he said, “Most people tell me that right away.”

Damen stared at him, brows furrowing slightly, the ridiculous smile now reduced to a gentle curve across his face. Laurent felt the gaze like a physical touch as it moved over him, Damen’s eyes following each line of his body on the bed.

“I would have,” said Damen, “if I’d had the chance to court you properly. If I’d come in state to your father. If there had been a chance for our countries to be—” He broke off, and Laurent could see the dark cloud settling itself behind Damen’s eyes. He ignored it. He would not allow this moment to be soured.

“Thank you, I know exactly how it would have been. You and Auguste would have been slapping each other on the back and watching tournaments, and I would have been trailing around tugging on your sleeve, trying to get a look in edgewise.”

Damen stiffened, slightly, at the mention of Auguste. It wasn’t tension, exactly—more the posture of a man who has just spotted a deer in the woods, and knows that the slightest shift might cause the creature to flee.

After a moment, Laurent said, “He would have liked you.” It was true; it was simple. Yet the truth of it nearly tugged his heart out of his chest.

“Even after I started courting his little brother?” said Damen carefully.

Laurent paused as he felt the impact of the words, the dizzying spill through his mind of some other, surreal world that might have existed. He lifted his eyes to meet Damen’s.

“Yes,” said Laurent softly. He felt the ache of it, that other life that would never be. And the beauty of it, that some piece had survived—had grown, like a weed, roots tangled and leaves laughing at the sun.

The kiss happened because they couldn’t help it, and it was so sweet and so right that Laurent felt he might dissolve completely. It was Damen who pulled back. Laurent could see the twisting thoughts as they played themselves out across his features, the darkening, the dampening of light in those eyes. “I—” Damen started to speak.

“No. Listen to me.” Laurent’s hand was on the back of his neck; he could feel the pulse under fingertips. “I’m not going to let my uncle hurt you.” The truth of it was armor-heavy, both protector and burden, a certainty that Laurent felt down to his bones. He needed Damen to know it, to understand it. There had been so much pain, between them— _no more_. “It’s what I came here last night to say. I’m going to take care of it.”

“Promise me,” Damen said, voice twisted up against tongue and teeth, “Promise me we won’t let him—”

“I promise.”

The words held no pretense; they were raw, stripped bare. It was the easiest promise in the world to make. _Anything_ —Laurent would do anything. Anything to keep the embered light burning steady in those eyes, anything to keep this man from guttering like a doused flame.

Damen nodded, his grip on Laurent tightening. The kissing this time had an echo of last night’s desperation, a need to block out the outside world and stay for a moment longer in this cocoon, as Laurent wound his arms around Damen’s neck. Damen rolled over him, body fitting against body. The sheet slipped away from them. Slow rocking began to turn kissing into something else.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Laurent, turning his head towards the sound.

Damen said, “ _Laurent,_ ” voice colored by shock as the door swung open. Laurent supposed he _had_ made a bit of a fuss about ensuring that no one misconstrued their relationship; he disliked the speculation when it was unfounded. But now there was hardly anything to misconstrue—everything was exactly as it appeared to be. Problem solved. When Pallas entered, Laurent greeted him with no self-consciousness at all.

“Yes?” He kept his voice matter-of-fact.

Pallas’ mouth opened. Laurent knew what he must see: the frigid Veretian prince like some dream of a newly fucked virgin, with the Akielon king unmistakably above him, fully roused. And, Laurent noted, now blushing wildly. It was almost disconcerting, the amount of surprise between their two faces. Hadn’t all the men been discussing whether Laurent was bending over for his brother’s killer throughout this entire campaign? Didn’t both companies know that Damianos had served him as a slave? By now, Laurent had expected the scandal would be old news. Based on the soldier’s reaction, it clearly was not.

Pallas forced his eyes to the floor.

“My apologies, Exalted. I came to seek your orders for the morning.”

Damen had, at this point, detached himself. He clutched the sheet, pulling it up to cover himself, which hardly seemed necessary—Pallas’s gaze was glued firmly to his own feet. Still, Damen did not seem prepared to answer.

“We’re busy currently. Have a servant prepare the baths and bring us food at mid-morning.” Laurent spoke like an administrator glancing up from his desk.

“Yes, Exalted.”

Pallas turned blindly, and made for the door. 

“What is it?” Laurent turned to Damen, whose hands were still tangled in the sheets. And then, with the burgeoning delight of discovery, “Are you _shy_?”

“In Akielos we don’t,” said Damen, “in front of other people.”

“Not even the King?”

“Especially not the King,” said Damen, a touch defensively.

“But how does the court know if the royal marriage has been consummated?”

“The King knows whether or not it has been consummated!” Horrified.

Laurent stared at him for a moment, drinking in the expression of abject mortification. And then he dropped his head, unable to stop the laughter that shook his entire body. Gasping for breath, the words emerged, “ _You wrestled him without any clothes on._ ”

“That is _sports,_ ” said Damen. He folded his arms petulantly, and Laurent could not help sitting up to press a delighted kiss to Damen’s lips, which seemed to mollify him slightly.

Later, “The King of Vere really consummates his marriage in front of the court?”

“Not in front of the court,” said Laurent, taken aback by the absurdity of the question, “in front of the Council.”

“Guion is on the Council!” said Damen.

Later, they lay alongside one another, and Damen traced a fingertip over the scar on Laurent’s shoulder. After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry Govart is dead. I know you were trying to keep him alive.”

Laurent was struck, once more, by how much Damen had noticed on their southward journey. “I thought he knew something that I could use against my uncle. It doesn’t matter. We’ll stop him another way.”

“You never told me what happened.”

Laurent remembered the tearing weight of the heavy oak chair in his ruined arm. He remembered the smell of Guion’s breath, sour and damp, and the hot slide of blood against skin.

“It was nothing. There was a knife fight. I got free, and Guion and I came to an arrangement.”

Damen gazed at him.

“What?”

“Nikandros is never going to believe it,” said Damen.

“I don’t see why not.”

“You were taken prisoner, you singlehandedly escaped from the cells at Fortaine, and somehow managed to get Guion to switch sides on the way out?”

“Well,” said Laurent, “not everyone is as bad at escaping as you are.”

Damen let out a breath, and then he was laughing, as if the entire world and all its ugliness had been peeled away and it was this, just this, just them together in this bed. Laurent felt the moment swell, threatening to engulf him. Damen’s laughter had the same warm, rough, crackling cadence of firewood. When he looked up at Laurent, smiling, Laurent wanted to say _don’t stop, please, don’t stop._ And then Damen spoke.

“When you lost your brother, was there someone to comfort you?”

“Yes,” said Laurent. “In a way.” His heart had gone cold in his chest.

“Then I’m glad,” said Damen. “I’m glad you weren’t alone.”

_You can be good, can’t you? You don’t want me to leave you alone…you want me to stay, don’t you, Laurent? Don’t you love me?_

Laurent pushed himself away, up into a sitting position, memory crawling like beetles through every corner of his mind. He pushed his palms into his eye sockets. Next to him, he could feel Damen’s concern, an almost-palpable shift in the air—and yet he could not entirely untangle himself, thinking of comfort, of loneliness, of hands, fingers larger than his own, heavy with rings—

“What is it?”

Damen’s voice was soft, gentle in its confusion. Laurent forced the ghosts from his shoulders. “It’s nothing,” he said.

Damen, sitting up alongside him, shifted, as if he, too, could feel the echo of the Regent’s touch in the space between them. “We should—”

“And we will.” Laurent turned to him, sliding fingers into Damen’s hair. He would not allow this moment between them to be torn by the jagged edges of the past, of the future—would not let it be ruined. Not yet. Not when he had no way of knowing how many moments like these might be left.

“But first, we have the morning.”

***

After, they talked.

Servants brought a breakfast of fruits, soft cheese, honey and breads on round platters, and they sat at the table in one of the rooms that opened onto the bedchamber. Damen took the seat closest to the wall, affixing the gold pin he had recovered to the cotton at his shoulder. Laurent sat in a relaxed pose, in only pants and a loose shirt, its collar and sleeves still open. He talked.

Quietly, seriously, Laurent outlined the state of play as he saw it, describing his plans and his contingencies. He, of course, could not reveal everything—Laurent could imagine how Damen might respond if he understood the true nature of what must be done. Still, Laurent was sharing a part of himself that he had never shared before; the political complexities of constructing countermoves in his uncle’s games had always been played out almost entirely in his own mind, never aloud. It was strange, opening his thoughts like this. There was a new rhythm to it as Damen provided his own ideas, their voices ebbing and flowing like tides.

When servants entered to clear the plates from the table, Laurent watched them come and go and then looked at Damen. The question hung between them, unspoken. Laurent remembered that first night at Marlas, the slaves lined up neatly in rows. Nikandros’ words: _The King has already made his preference for no slaves known._

“You are not keeping slaves in your household.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Damen.

“If you’ve forgotten what to do with a slave, I can tell you,” said Laurent.

“You hate the idea of slavery. It turns your stomach.” Damen said it, a flat statement of truth. “If I’d been anyone else, you would have freed me on the first night.” Now he was searching Laurent’s face, eyes implacable. “When I argued the case for slavery in Arles you didn’t try to change my mind.”

“It is not a subject for an _exchange of ideas._ There is nothing to say.”

“There will be slaves in Akielos. We are a slave culture.”

 _We are already in Akielos,_ Laurent wanted to say, _and you are the King, and you are not keeping slaves._ But he only said, “I know that.”

Damen said, “Are pets and their contracts so different? Did Nicaise have a choice?”

Laurent bristled. “He had the choice of the poor with no other way to survive, the choice of a child powerless to his elders, the choice of a man when his King gives him an order, which is no choice at all, and yet still more than is afforded to a slave.”

There was something shifting in Damen’s features, something Laurent could not decipher. His own mind drifted to Nicaise, to his uncle, to all the boys who had suffered under those ringed hands. To the boy clutched, now, in those greedy fingers. Throughout their conversation, the fear had remained unspoken—yet Laurent could feel it, hovering, buzzing like gnats in the air around them. After a pause, he spoke.

“I know what you think of my uncle, but he is not—” He broke off, unsure of where the words were meant to carry that sentence. _Evil? Cruel? Not quite vile enough to—_ he could not even bring himself to think it, mind shying away reflexively.

“Not?” Damen prompted.

Laurent gathered himself. “He won’t hurt the child,” he said. “Whether it is your son or Kastor’s, it is leverage. It is leverage against you, against your armies, and against your men.”

“You mean that it hurts me more that my son is alive and whole than it would if he were maimed or dead.”

“Yes,” said Laurent.

He said it seriously, looking into Damen’s eyes. The child would have a few years, at least, of safety. Laurent cast his mind back, trying to remember the age of the youngest boy his uncle had brought to court—was it Nicaise? Ten? Or had there been others, away from the prying eyes of the courtiers at Arles—too young even for that nest of vipers? Laurent tried not to think it, as if to even consider the possibility was to invite it into reality.

They had an entire army gathered, Veretians and Akielons alike, ready to march south. Laurent had spent months with Damen assembling their forces, establishing a base of power, setting up supply lines, winning soldiers to their cause.

In one stroke, the Regent had rendered the army useless, unable to move, unable to fight, because if they did—

“My uncle knows you won’t move against him while he holds the child,” said Laurent. And then, calmly, steadily, “So we get him back.”

***

The waiting was more difficult than he expected. Laurent stood, alone, in the war room, staring at the sand tray that dominated more than half of the table. Etched into the grains was a rough map of Akielos, cut off at the southern border of Vere. He skimmed his fingers over the top of one corner, watching the sand flee beneath his touch.

Damen had gone to speak to Jokaste—or, more accurately, to her women. They had all been reinstated in the solar, and the first order of business would be to wrench as much information as possible from their lips. _Use any means necessary,_ Laurent had said, and he had meant it. There was no time for half-measures, no time for Jokaste’s petty games.

Laurent trusted Damen to do what must be done. Still, he wanted, desperately, to be in that room—it felt acutely dangerous, leaving this piece of the plan entirely outside his control. But it had to be Damen; he was the only person to whom Jokaste might, at this juncture, respond. And if Damen showed no weakness, if he played every card exactly right—it might be possible. Yet Laurent could not erase the image of Damen’s face in the cells, glimpsed through the grille. He thought of the anguish, the way the features had been stripped raw. His heart was a closed fist as he waited, uselessly.

The door opened, and for a moment Laurent saw only the dark curls, the sloped nose in profile—his heart kicked. But then the intruder turned. It was not Damen.

It was Nikandros.

He paused for a moment, eyes hovering on Laurent. And then he appeared to steel himself, shoulders thrust back as he stepped into the room. Laurent saw, clearly, that Nikandros had expected to find the chambers empty; he saw, also, that they had shared the same instinct. Impotent with waiting, Nikandros had come to stare idly at the maps.

“He is speaking with Jokaste,” said Nikandros.

“Yes,” said Laurent.

They stared at each other. They had not spoken directly since the okton, since the tent before the okton. Laurent remembered Nikandros’ fury, the words spat in a rage: _you flayed the skin from his back._ He saw the echo of that anger now, repressed, in the kyros’ gaze. The silence stretched, bloated and heavy, between them.

“Can he do it?” Laurent turned away as he spoke, eyes travelling back to the lines traced through the sand.

Nikandros did not answer immediately. When he did the words were halting, as if drawn unwillingly from his mouth by some outside force. “I—do not…in Ios, I tried to warn him about—her. Once. He did not believe me then.”

“And now?”

“Now.” Nikandros released a breath and stopped, as if that single word was enough. He shook his head before speaking again, “She was the one who sent him to—you. Kastor does not have the mind for that. It was Jokaste who put him in chains.”

Laurent could hear the disgust in Nikandros’ voice, the hatred like venom as he spoke her name. Yet the words sparked something in his own mind, the edge of realization like cut glass. He had always assumed that it was the Regent’s hand, alone, guiding the exchange. He considered Nikandros’ words and thought of Jokaste, alone and regal in the moldering cells, thought of her voice as she’d said _it makes you feel like you can do anything._ He knew that feeling.

“Who was she?” said Laurent. "Before." Nikandros blinked.

“Nobody.” He turned away as he answered, a rueful smile creeping reluctantly onto his face, “The daughter of a minor noble from Aegina. She would have lived and died in the countryside, had her father not presented her at court. I tried to dissuade him—told him that no woman was worth the months of courting. _You are the crown prince,_ I told him, _you could have anyone._ But when Damen sets his mind to something…” He trailed off, and the smile bled away. He was frowning when he turned back to Laurent.

“The way he looked at her—it’s the way, sometimes, that I see him look at you.”

The words put Laurent’s stomach in knots. Nikandros was studying him, a question wrapped up behind the gaze. His eyes were wary, guarded. He waited for a response.

Laurent did not give one. He stared back, face a placid mask, features sheeted in icy removal. When the silence became a tangible weight between them, he raised a brow.

“If you have something to say, then by all means, speak freely.”

The frown deepened. “Damianos is a good man, but he is not foolish. He will not be quick to fall into the same trap twice. Nor would I let him.”

Laurent said, “I should hope not.” He kept his voice wry, dryly amused at the threat that lingered in Nikandros’ tone.

Nikandros was loyal to Damen—that was good. Damianos would need loyal friends, when he was king. Better yet, Nikandros spoke like a politician, and that was certainly a skill in which Damen would soon need proficiency. It was good that there would be someone to temper him, someone to mitigate that flaring temper, to soften the blunted words that spilled so often from Damen’s tongue. He was so quick, always, to speak his mind. He was such an open book.

Laurent’s throat felt tight. 

He swallowed. Nikandros was still staring at him through narrowed eyes. There was another pause before he spoke.

“You say that—and yet I see, also, the way you look at him.”

“Oh?” said Laurent, quirking the brow once more; relaxed; bemused; self-assured. “And how’s that?”

Nikandros shook his head. “At times, the same way she did.”


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Were it an option, Laurent suspected that Damen might simply throw Jokaste into a sack and carry her bodily across the border into Kastor’s territory. Unfortunately, it was not an option; they were thus presented with certain logistical challenges.

In order to justify two wagons and an entourage, they would be pretending to be cloth merchants. This disguise was not going to stand up to any serious scrutiny. There would be bolts of cloth in the wagons. There would also be Jokaste. Stepping out into the courtyard, she looked at the preparations with the sort of calm that said she would cooperate wholly with their plans, and then, given the first opportunity, smile and wreck them.

Still, Laurent was confident in their disguise. Upon agreeing to the plan, he had broken from the meeting to make arrangements privately with Vannes, who would be remaining behind at the border to oversee his Veretian troops. After a handful of hours spent ensuring, to the best of his ability, that things would run smoothly in his absence—without, of course, indicating to Vannes exactly how long that absence would last—he sought out Damen, who had been in charge of plotting routes with Nikandros.

Laurent found the Akielon King alone, staring at a map as though he might have liked to strangle it. When he inquired as to the issue, Damen huffed in frustration over border patrols.

“‘Cloth merchants’ might help us travel unimpeded inside Akielos, but it will not get us past border sentries—and it certainly won’t get us past border sentries alerted by Jokaste about our possible coming.”

Laurent raised a brow. “So we tell them that we are the entourage to the Lady Jokaste, returning to Ios.”

Damen frowned. “They’ll never believe us.”

“And why not? We will have the Lady Jokaste there with us.”

“Yes,” said Damen, “That is precisely the problem.”

“She need only verify our story for us to proceed. It will only be a few hours head-start, but I should think that would be sufficient.”

Damen was now studying him, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “And how do you propose we convince Jokaste to verify our story?”

"Simple,” Laurent said, “The sentries will not be speaking to her. They will speak to me.”

They were taking the best of their soldiers, those elite few who had excelled in the games: Jord who had won short sword, Lydos of the trident, Aktis the spear thrower, the young, triple-crowned Pallas, Lazar, who had whistled at him, and a handful of their best spear throwers and swordsmen. Laurent’s addition to the expedition was Paschal—there was no telling when they might have need of a physician, and he was one of the few men at the fort whom Laurent could truly trust.

Laurent insisted, also, on bringing Guion. Guion could use a sword. Guion’s guilt made him more likely to fight for Damen than anyone else. And if the worst happened, Guion’s testimony had the potential to bring down the Regency. Laurent had said all of this succinctly, and told Guion, in a pleasant voice, “Your wife can chaperone Jokaste on the journey.”

Guion had taken the bait immediately. “I see. My wife is the leverage for my good behavior?”

“That’s right,” said Laurent. He kept carefully concealed his other, more pressing reasons behind ensuring that Loyse accompanied them—reasons that, he hoped, would never come to pass.

The company gathered in the courtyard: two wagons, two noblewomen, and twelve soldiers of whom ten were soldiers and two were Guion and Paschal in metal hats. Laurent retired to his rooms to don his own disguise: an unadorned Akielon chiton of white cotton.

He had never worn Akielon clothing before. It left his arms bare, along with his throat, his legs, and his left shoulder. Laurent frowned as he pinned the garment in place. He failed to understand how such clothing was in any way practical for horseback riding—much less fighting, if it came to that.

He tried to ignore the strange sensation of air, cooled by the stone walls of the fort, against skin as he made his way to the chambers where Damen was waiting for him. When he entered, he saw that Damen was dressed in an identical chiton, with a wrist-gauntlet of leather strapped over the golden cuff. He had just lifted a glazed pitcher of wine in order to pour it into one of the waiting shallow cups.

“Did you learn the rotation of the border patrols?” said Laurent.

“Yes, our scouts found—”

The words cut off abruptly as Damen turned and saw him, standing in the doorway. The sight of the Akielon clothing seemed to shock him; his eyes widened, his cheeks flushed with color. He appeared to forget, momentarily, how to speak—and to forget, also, the pitcher he was holding.

It shattered, shards flying outward as it slipped from Damen’s fingers and hit the stone floor.

Laurent suppressed a bemused smile. Cumbersome as it might be for horseback riding, it appeared that the chiton had at least some positive qualities.

“You’re wearing Akielon clothing,” said Damen.

“Everyone’s wearing Akielon clothing,” said Laurent.

Damen continued to stare as he came forward, navigating the broken ceramic with as much poise as his sandaled feet would allow, until he reached the seat beside Damen, where the map was laid out on the wooden table.

“Once we know the rotation of the patrols, we’ll know when to approach,” said Laurent.

He sat down.

“We need to approach at the beginning of their rotation in order to give us the most time before they report back to the fort.”

Damen still appeared incapable of speaking, lips parted slightly as his eyes followed the line of cotton along Laurent’s thighs.

“Damen.”

“Yes. Sorry,” said Damen. And then: “What were you saying?”

“The patrols,” said Laurent.

The plan was no less outrageous when laid out in meticulous detail, with estimates of travel times and distances. The risk if it failed was enormous. They were taking as many soldiers as they could justify, but if they were discovered, if it came to a fight, they would lose. They had only twelve soldiers. Twelve-ish, if they included Paschal and Guion.

In the courtyard, Laurent surveyed the small assembled party. The armies they had spent so long building would be left behind. Vannes and Makedon would stay to jointly defend the network they had established, from Ravenel, through Fortaine, Marlas, and Sicyon. Vannes could handle Makedon, Laurent had assured Damen.

It felt somehow inevitable—as if some part of him knew that an army was never going to be the way to fight the Regent. That it was always going to be like this, a small group, alone and vulnerable, making their way across the countryside. His uncle had always preferred to fight battles once he had his opponents cornered.

And yet, there was a flicker of hope as he watched Damen briefing the soldiers. Even in the humble merchant’s dress he was regal, powerful, commanding. Riding at his side, it was impossible to feel as if they would fail. Laurent swallowed the emotion, the way he might swallow bile—he already knew how this journey would end. For himself, at least. And yet, looking at Damen, he could not stop himself from feeling that it all would somehow be worth it.

***

Nikandros protested strenuously, even after Laurent had climbed into the wagon. They were approaching the border sentry on the southern road that crossed from Sicyon into the province of Mellos. At the first glimpse of the blockade and the sentry tower beyond, they had paused their procession for Laurent to join the women’s wagon, tucked away out of sight of the patrol. Directly outside, he could hear Nikandros insisting, in a low voice, that the plan was dishonorable. Laurent wondered, mildly, what the man would think if he knew the full extent of what the plan entailed.

He waited patiently in the wagon with Loyse, who turned her eyes resolutely away but said nothing as he laced himself into blue silk. They had a long, trundling ride across the countryside, during which they remained in uneasy silence as Laurent arranged himself carefully amongst the whispering cloth.

His heart pounded as he felt the wagon slow, aware of the riskiness of his disguise, the incongruity of the wagon, the awkward mien of the Akielon soldiers, who had had to be schooled multiple times not to call Damen “Exalted,” and the threat of Jokaste herself, waiting cool-eyed inside her wagon.

The danger was real. If Jokaste found her way out of her bindings and gag to make a sound, or was discovered in all her venomous glory, they faced capture and death. The sentry tower held, according to Damen’s estimation, at least fifty men, in addition to the forty or so that would be present in the patrol to guard the road. There was no way to fight past them.

The wagon ground to a halt.

Laurent heard the sounds—the groaning of wood, the nickering of horses, the muted voices of the men. He listened closely, body coiled in tension, heart in his throat, and recognized Damen’s voice.

“We are the escort to the Lady Jokaste, returning to Ios after her labor.”

There was a short silence, and then: “Our reports said that the Lady Jokaste was taken prisoner at Karthas.” It had to be the Captain of the company speaking. Laurent could hear the thick layer of suspicion that coated his words.

“Your reports are wrong. The Lady Jokaste is in that wagon.”

There was a pause.

“In that wagon.”

“That’s right.”

Another pause. Laurent held his breath.

“I’m sure that the Lady Jokaste won’t mind answering a few questions.”

“I’m sure she will mind,” said Damen. “She requested—quite clearly—not to be disturbed.”

“We have orders to search every wagon that comes through. The lady will have to make allowances.” There was a new tone in the Captain’s voice. There had been too many objections. To stall again wouldn’t be safe.

Even so, Laurent heard Damen saying, “You can’t just barge in on—”

“Open the wagon,” said the Captain, ignoring him.

The first attempt was less like the throwing open of illicit cargo and more like the awkward knocking on a lady’s door. Laurent gave no answer—better to allow the Captain to become comfortable in his assumption of falsehood, that he might be all the more surprised when the presence of the lady was confirmed. Shock, Laurent had learned from experience, was oftentimes sufficient to wipe suspicion from the mind. A second knock went unanswered. A third.

“You see? She’s sleeping. Are you really going to—”

The Captain called, “Open it up!”

Laurent had just closed his eyes when there came the splintering sound of impact, as of a wooden bolt struck by a mallet. He jerked in a careful imitation of body startled awake, allowing the movement to disturb the cloth around his legs so that it slid, tantalizingly, upwards. Gazing towards the sunlight that spilled in, he found himself confronted with the sight of the Akielon Captain. Next to him, Loyse was a statue.

For a moment, there was silence as the Captain stared down at him. Laurent knew what the man saw: the spill of blond hair, the softened lips, tinted pink with paint, the fine blue dress wrapped over carefully constructed curves. A noblewoman, still reclining where she had been woken from sleep.

“M—my Lady, I—”

“And what is this?” Laurent’s words, cold as ice, cut across the Captain’s startled speech. He pressed himself up on one arm, deepening the curve of waist and hip, and adjusted the cloth across his legs, drawing the man’s eye away from his face. “Has something happened?”

“I—forgive me, my Lady, I—”

“It was a simple question. Has someone died? Are we under attack?’

The Captain flushed. “No, my Lady.”

“Then why,” said Laurent, voice twisted high in his throat, each word its own knife, “Have you intruded? Was it not the orders of the King that I return to Ios as quickly as possible? What reason have you to delay me from seeing my son?”

“I apologize, my Lady, it is only that we have been given orders to search—”

“To search!” Laurent released an incredulous huff of air, “Did my men withhold some information? Were you not aware of my presence?” The Captain was now red-faced and sweating slightly. Laurent pressed on, sharp indignance coloring his tone, “Was it some secret that I had given birth to your new prince, not even five days hence? Was it beyond your mental acuity, your cognitive abilities, to consider that I _might,_ after this ordeal, want to rest, without my entourage halted and the door of my wagon torn from its hinges?”

“I apologize, my Lady.” At this point the Captain seemed unable even to meet Laurent’s gaze, eyes trained resolutely on the floor in front of his feet.

Laurent sniffed. “Your apologies do nothing to regain my wasted time. You will accompany my entourage personally through the last of the checkpoints to ensure that your insult is not repeated.” He waved his hand, a curt dismissal. “Leave me.” The Captain turned, and did as ordered.

Laurent reclined in the wagons throughout the rest of the journey, prepared in case of any other intrusions. But with the Akielon Captain accompanying their group, the remainder of the trip progressed smoothly. When they parted ways at the final checkpoint, Laurent waited as they trundled on for two miles, until Damen determined that the checkpoint was safely out of sight behind a hill and called for a halt. The wagon door swung open. Laurent stepped out wearing only a loose Veretian shirt, slightly disheveled over his pants. Nikandros looked from him to the wagon and back again.

He said, “How did you convince Jokaste to play along with the guards?”

“I didn’t,” said Laurent.

He tossed the wad of blue silk in his hands to one of the soldiers to dispose of, then shrugged into his jacket in a rather mannish gesture.

Nikandros was staring at him.

“Don’t think about it too much,” said Damen, smiling.

***

They had two hours before the sentries returned to the main fort and saw that Lady Jokaste had not arrived, at which point the Captain would have a slow-dawning realization. Not long after that, Kastor’s men would appear, pounding down the road after them.

Jokaste gave Damen a cool look when they took out the cloth from her mouth and undid her bindings. Her skin reacted like Laurent’s had to confinement: red weals where they had tied her wrists with silk rope. Laurent held out his hand to escort her back from the supply wagon into the main wagon a bored Veretian gesture. Her eyes had the same bored look as she took his hand. “You’re lucky we’re alike,” she said, stepping down. Behind the boredom in her eyes, there was venom.

In order to avoid Kastor’s patrols, they were riding for a childhood sanctuary of Damen’s, the estate of Heston of Thoas. Heston’s estate, Damen had said, pointing at the map, was thickly wooded and contained ample places to hide and wait for patrols to pass, until interest in them slackened. He had assured them, also, that Heston was fiercely loyal, and would shelter them from an invading army.

The countryside was unfamiliar, and ill-suited to hiding wagons. Akielos in summer: part rocky hillside covered with brush and scrub, and stretches of cultivatable land, scented with orange blossom. Wooded patches of concealing trees were rare. With the danger of patrols growing, Laurent could feel his heart twisting with apprehension at their plan to leave the wagons unprotected while Damen rode ahead, scouting the territory and making his presence known to Heston. But it was too late to change to their course—they had no choice.

“Keep the wagons on course,” Damen said to Nikandros. “I’ll be swift, and I’ll take our best rider with me.”

“That’s me,” said Laurent, wheeling his horse.

They made fast time, Laurent light and sure in the saddle. About half a mile out from the estate, they dismounted, and tethered their horses out of sight off the road. They proceeded the rest of the way on foot, pushing scrub out of their path, sometimes bodily. 

Sweeping a branch out of his face, Damen said, “I thought when I was King I wouldn’t be doing this kind of thing again.”

“You underestimated the demands of Akielon kingship,” said Laurent.

He watched as Damen stepped on a rotten log. Then unpicked the bottom of his garment from a thorn bush. Then sidestepped a jut of razor-sharp granite.

“The undergrowth was thinner when I was a boy.”

“Or you were.”

Laurent said it holding back a low tree branch for Damen, who stepped past with a rustle. Cresting the final rise together, they saw their destination spread out before them.

The estate of Heston of Thoas was a long, low series of cool, marble-fluted buildings that opened onto private gardens, and from there to picturesque orchards of nectarine and apricot.

Laurent narrowed his eyes, studying the terrain. The whole estate was dotted with convenient rocks that protruded through the thin covering of soil. They provided a covered route from the scraggle of trees where he stood with Damen all the way down to the house gate—and from there it would be a simple matter to make their way to the inner rooms. Next to him, Laurent could feel the eager tension in Damen’s body as he took in the scene, features glowing with nostalgia. He took a step, unthinkingly, forward.

“Stop,” said Laurent.

Damen stopped. Laurent indicated with his gaze to where a dog was lounging on its chain near a small penned field full of horses on the west side of the estate. They were downwind; it had not yet begun to bark.

“There are too many horses,” said Laurent.

Damen paused to look again at the pen, face falling. It held at least fifty horses, in a small overstuffed patch of field that was never meant to contain them; it would be grazed out too quickly.

And they were not the lighter steeds bred for an aristocrat to ride. They were soldiers’ mounts, all of them, big-chested and heavy with muscle to carry the weight of a rider in armor. Someone had ensured that Damianos would find no refuge here.

“Jokaste,” said Damen.

His hands clenched into fists, jaw set in a hard line. Laurent could see the anger in his face, the frustration in his tensed shoulders—and something more, something deeper behind the eyes; that pain that came, still, with each small betrayal she struck against him. Laurent’s heart knocked against his ribs.

“I can’t leave Heston to Kastor’s men,” said Damen. “I owe him.”

“He’s only in danger if you’re found here. Then he’s a traitor,” Laurent said.

Their eyes met, and the understanding passed between them, quickly and wordlessly: they needed another way to get the wagons off the road—and they needed to do it avoiding the sentries posted at Heston’s estate.

“There’s a stream a few miles to the north that runs through woodland,” Damen said. “It will cover our tracks, and keep us off the road.”

“I’ll take care of the sentries,” said Laurent.

“You left the dress in the wagon,” said Damen.

“Thank you, I do have other ways of getting past a sentry.”

They understood each other. The light through the trees caught itself up in Damen’s hair, the curls dark as ink and twisted in disrupted patterns from their trek through the scrub. Damen said, “The stream is north of that second rise. We’ll wait for you downstream of its second meander.”

Laurent nodded and slipped away, wordlessly.

He picked his way through the protruding rocks, remaining carefully downwind of the small dog. The first order of business was to slip unnoticed into the pen of horses—an easy enough task, given the overcrowding of the enclosure. Laurent wove gently through the heavy bodies, pausing every so often to brush hand against flank or press shoulder into side. Accustomed to the presence of soldiers, the horses remained unperturbed by his unobtrusive stroll, responding every so often only with soft nickering or cursory snorts.

Satisfied that his clothes—already sweat-dampened from the previous ride—now smelled entirely of horse (and his skin, and his hair), Laurent plotted a seamless route from pen to nearby dog, panting in the summer heat. The animal, presented with no unfamiliar scents, sensed no danger as Laurent drew close to its chain and, quietly, unhooked it from its tether.

It was not the brightest dog. It spent a matter of minutes lying on its belly, tongue lolling, before it moved to scratch an itch and discovered, miraculously, the way in which its chain now dragged across the scrubby grass. Laurent, who had withdrawn to the edge of the pen a few paces away, watched as the dog sprung to its feet, tail wagging, and began to celebrate its newfound freedom with a serenade of grating, high-pitched barking and a frenetic jumping dance that carried its body in dizzy circles towards horses.

A yappy dog in an over-stuffed pen had a predictable effect on the horses; they bucked, bolted and burst from the enclosure. The grazing in Heston’s private garden being excellent, when the rails came down, the horses streamed out to partake of it, and to partake of the grazing in the adjacent crop fields, and of the grazing quite far away, over the eastern hill. The spasming excitement of the dog egged them on. As did the sylph-like actions of Laurent, moving to untie ropes and slip open rails.

Laurent felt the satisfied grin that twisted across his face as he heard the distant Akielon shouts, coming from the main estate: _The horses! Round up the horses!_ They had no horses with which to round up the horses. There was going to be a lot of stomping around on foot, trying to catch mounts and cursing small dogs.

Now he had only to make his way north, through the woodland, and find the second meander of the stream that Damen had indicated. The orchards, fortunately, lay towards the north of the estate—relatively clear of horses, who preferred the low-sprouting plants of the gardens and the flat grazing land of the crop fields. Laurent moved soundlessly, darting between rocks until they were replaced by the superior coverage of trees. He disappeared amongst the branches, heavy with the bodies of ripe fruit and glowing with the little jewels of green leaves.

The sounds of the estate grew faint behind him; the voices of men, the nickering horses, the little barking dog all fading. In their place grew the indolent quiet of summer, punctuated only by the lazy buzzing of insects and the soft press of Laurent’s own feet. The foliage of the trees burst out from their narrow rows, breaking the sunlight into pieces overhead, so that the heat danced with cooler patches of shade. The air was swallowed in the heavy sweetness of the apricots.

Laurent paused for a moment at the edge of the orchard, where the neat rows gave way to tangled woodland. He gazed back at the trees. His heart felt swollen with it—the sugared smell, the close heat, the beauty. He plucked an apricot from a tree, and the fruit came easily, willingly, as if glad to be severed from stem. The skin broke without protest under his teeth. Juice burst across tongue, simple and clear and sweet. He bit to the core of it, until his mouth scraped across the pit.

He felt, acutely, as if something were coming into focus. As if, in the orchard, he could understand Damen more deeply. Laurent had seen Akielon war; had seen their spears and armor, their games and laurel crowns. He had seen Akielon honor, Akielon violence, Akielon blood. But he had never seen their orchards. He had never tasted Akielon apricots, so heavy with the summer sun that they fell practically of their own accord into outstretched, hungry hands.

It got cooler the deeper he went into the woodland, as the trees grew taller, the branches curling together so that their leaves provided a steady barrier against the sun. It did not take long to find the stream, and Laurent followed it, breathing in the water-cooled air. The silence was different here, voiceless, the insects replaced with only the soft rustling movements of the occasional creature ducking into its burrow.

He palmed his way from tree trunk to tree trunk until he saw them, halted, waiting. Their sandaled feet were slick with water, dirt and debris clinging to the skin, and Laurent could see from the darkened wood of the wagon wheels that their journey through the stream had been recent. The group stood in silence, eyes flickering nervously over the trees, wary tension etched into the lines of each man’s body. When a twig broke under Laurent’s foot, eleven hands went to swords, Akielon and Veretian blades drawn soundlessly. He continued forward. Another twig snapped.

And then Damen saw him, and the tension spilled like oil from his shoulders as he said, “You’re late.”

“I brought you a souvenir.”

Laurent tossed Damen an apricot. He smiled as he caught it, mirroring the quiet exultation of Laurent’s own men. The Akielons, by contrast, looked a little dazed. Nikandros passed Laurent his reins.

“Is this how you do things in Vere?”

“You mean effectively?” said Laurent.

And swung up onto his horse.

***

Risk of laming was high, and they made slow progress along the stream bed because they had to protect the wagons. Riders went ahead to ensure the stream didn’t deepen or quicken in current, and that the stream bed remained a gentle shale with enough purchase for the wheels.

Damen called the halt. They pulled up onto a bank, where an outcrop of rock could disguise a small fire. There were granite ruins here too, which would also provide cover. The shapes were familiar, reminiscent of those at Acquitart and Marlas, though here they were only the remains of a wall, the stones worn and covered in undergrowth.

Pallas and Aktis put their skills to work and speared fish, which they ate baked and flaky wrapped in leaves. Lauren drank the clear water from the stream; the rest of the company had fortified wine, a sweet supplement to their usual road fare of bread and hard cheese. The horses, tied for the night, grazed a little, whuffling the ground gently. Jord and Lydos took first watch, while the others came to sit in a semicircle around their small fire.

When Damen came to sit too, everyone suddenly scrambled up and stood, awkwardly. Earlier, Laurent had tossed Damen his bedroll and said, “Unpack this,” and Pallas had almost challenged him to a duel for the insult. Clearly, sitting down and eating cheese casually with their King was not something that they knew how to do. Laurent watched in amusement as Damen poured a shallow cup of wine and passed it to the soldier beside him, Pallas. There was a long silence in which the poor man stood, obviously garnering every piece of courage that he had to reach out and take it.

Laurent strolled up to the impasse, threw himself down on the log next to Damen, and in an expressionless voice launched into the story of the brothel adventure that had earned him the blue dress, which was so unabashedly filthy it made Lazar blush, and so funny it had Pallas wiping his eyes. The Veretians asked frank questions about Laurent’s escape from the brothel. This led to frank answers and more eye wiping, as everyone had opinions about brothels that were translated and mistranslated hilariously. The wine was passed around.

Not to be outdone, the Akielons told Laurent about their escape from Kastor’s soldiers—how they had narrowly avoided a company that came riding, suddenly, down the road. They described crouching in the stream bed, the race in slow wagons, the hiding behind tree fronds. Pallas did a decent impression of Paschal’s riding. Lazar watched Pallas with lazy admiration. It wasn’t the impression he was admiring. Next to Laurent, Damen bit into the apricot.

When Damen rose a while later, everyone remembered again that he was the King, but the stiff formality was banished, and he made his way to the bedroll that he had dutifully unpacked with a small smile still playing at the corners of his mouth. Laurent watched him lie down. He could see the rise and fall of his chest, silhouetted in the dim light from the fire.

He waited until the others had begun to disperse before he rose, stepping carefully through their small encampment to drop his bedroll beside Damen’s. He stretched out, heart stuttering strangely, and they lay alongside one another under the stars.

“You smell of horse,” said Damen.

“It’s how I got past the dog.”

Above them, the sky was full of bright points of steady light. Laurent searched for the constellations that he had once drawn with Auguste. He remembered a story that his brother had read to him when he was a child, in which a man captured a star using the heart of a rabbit.

“It’s like old times,” said Damen.

It was ridiculous; it wasn’t true—even the air between them had changed, reforming to fit itself into the new shape of all they had shared. Yet Laurent understood exactly what he meant, and could almost taste the happiness in his voice as he said it. Sweet and clear, like the juice of the apricot.

“My first trip to Akielos,” said Laurent.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s like Vere, with fewer places to have a bath,” Laurent turned to lie on his side, and when Damen shifted sideways to look back at him their postures echoed each other.

“The stream is right there.”

“You want me wandering around the Akielon countryside naked at night?” And then, “You smell just as much of horse as I do.”

“More,” said Damen. He was smiling. The moonlight kissed his eyelashes, his cheekbones, his teeth. It made Laurent’s heart ache. Beyond them was the sleeping camp, and the ruins in granite that would crumble over time and fall away forever into the water.

“They’re Artesian. Aren’t they? From the old empire, Artes. They say it used to span both our countries.”

“Like the ruins at Acquitart,” said Laurent. He didn’t say, _And at Marlas._ “My brother and I used to play there as boys. Kill all the Akielons and restore the old empire.”

“My father had the same idea.”

 _And now they are dead, and we are here._ Laurent didn’t say it aloud, only let the thought settle, sighing, across his mind. His body was heavy, the exhaustion of the day's excursions bleeding through his limbs. His breathing came easy as he relaxed under the stars. Damen’s voice was soft when he spoke, pitched for the space between them.

“There’s a summer palace in Ios outside the capital. My mother designed the gardens there. They say it’s built on Artesian foundations.” Their eyes tangled together as he talked, Laurent listening. He had never heard Damen speak of his mother before. “It’s cool in summer, and there are fountains, and tracks for riding.” The words carried with them the slightest bit of strain, as if Damen was shy in saying them, “When all this is over…we could take horses and stay a week in the palace.”

 _When all this is over._ Since their night together in Karthas, they had not spoken of the future, except to plan their countermoves in the Regent’s game. Laurent remembered, painfully, Damen’s words that night: _can we not call it a kingdom and rule it together?_

 _Yes—_ the word was suffocating, locked in his throat— _yes, I want that, yes._ Damen was watching him, eyes dark and open and hopeful, waiting for him to answer. Laurent could picture it so clearly, the future in those awful, beautiful eyes, the days spent riding through Akielon sunlight, the nights wrapped in smooth stone.

But he could not bring himself to lie. Not now, not when there had already been so many other lies between them. And yet the truth, too, was full of pain—so that after a moment he heard himself say only, honestly, “I’d like that.”

It was enough for Damen, who rolled onto his back again, smiling once more as he looked up at the wide sweep of stars. Laurent watched until sleep carried him away, still half-choking on that impossible future, lodged in his throat like a sob.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! i'm still alive :) if ur still reading this fic--thanks for waiting two weeks! 
> 
> also--if you want my take on the brothel story, see ch 7 + 8 of desperate gambit if you haven't already


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